The Land of Macbeth
presents
17 Lectures by Andrew. C. Bradley (Professor of Poetry – University of Oxford)
1.
MACBETH, THE PLAY IN CONTEXT
2.
THE ATMOSPHERE OF MACBETH
3.
MACBETH AND THE WITCHES
4.
SIMILARITIES BETWEEN MACBETH AND LADY MACBETH
5.
THE CHARACTER OF MACBETH
6.
THE CHARACTER OF LADY MACBETH
7.
THE CHARACTER OF BANQUO
8.
"CHARACTERLESS" CHARACTERS
9.
MACDUFF, LADY MACDUFF AND THE PORTER
10. PASSAGES OF PROSE
11.
SUSPECTED INTERPOLATIONS IN MACBETH
12.
HAS MACBETH BEEN ABRIDGED?
13.
THE DATE OF MACBETH. METRICAL TESTS.
14.
WHEN WAS THE MURDER OF DUNCAN FIRST PLOTTED?
15.
DID LADY MACBETH REALL Y FAINT?
16.
DURATION OF THE ACTION IN MACBETH.
MACBETHS AGE. , HE HAS NO CHILDREN. ,
17.
THE GHOST OF BANQUO.
back to index ^
1. MACBETH, THE PLAY IN CONTEXT
MACBETH, it is probable, was the last-written of the four great tragedies, and immediately preceded
Antony and Cleopatra.(note 1, p 331]. In that play Shakespeare's final style appears for the first time
completely formed, and the transition to this style is much more decidedly visible in Macbeth than in
King Lear .Yet in certain respects Macbeth recalls Hamlet rather than Othello or King Lear. In the
heroes of both plays the passage from thought to a critical resolution and action is difficult, and excites
the keenest interest. In neither play, as in Othello and King Lear, is painful pathos one of the main
effects. Evil, again, though it shows in Macbeth a prodigious energy, is not the icy or stony
inhumanity of lago or Goneril; and, as in Hamlet, it is pursued by remorse. Finally, Shakespeare no
longer restricts the action to purely human agencies, as in the two preceding tragedies; portents once
more fill the heavens, ghosts rise from their graves, an unearthly light flickers about the head of the
doomed man. The special popularity of Hamlet and Macbeth is due in part to some of these common
characteristics, notably to the fascination of the supernatural, the absence of the spectacle of extreme
undeserved suffering, the absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of
grandeur. The reader who looks unwillingly at lago gazes at Lady Macbeth in awe, because though she
is dreadful she is also sublime. The whole tragedy is sublime.
In this, however, and in other respects, Macbeth makes an impression quite different from that of
Hamlet. The dimensions of the principal characters, the rate of movement in the action, the supernatural effect, the style, the versification, are an changed; and they are all changed in much the same
manner. In many parts of Macbeth there is in the language a peculiar compression, pregnancy, energy,
even violence; the harmonious grace and even flow, often conspicuous in Hamlet, have almost
disappeared. The chief characters, built on a scale at least as large as that of Othello, seem to attain at
times an almost superhuman stature. The diction has in places a huge and rugged grandeur, which
degenerates here and there into tumidity.
The solemn majesty of the royal Ghost in Hamlet, appearing in armour and standing silent in the
moonlight, is exchanged for shapes of horror, dimly seen in the murky air or revealed by the glare of
the cauldron fire in a dark cavern, or for the ghastly face of Banquo badged with blood and staring
with blank eyes. The other three tragedies all open with conversations, which lead into the action: here
the action bursts into wild life amidst the sounds of a thunderstorm and the echoes of a distant battle. It
hurries through seven very brief scenes of mounting suspense to a terrible crisis, which is reached, in
the murder of Duncan, at the beginning of the Second Act. Pausing a moment and changing its shape it
hastes again with scarcely diminished speed to fresh horrors. And even when the speed of the outward
action is slackened, the same effect Is continued in another form: we are shown a soul tortured by an
agony which admits not a moment's repose, and rushing in frenzy towards its doom. Macbeth is very
much shorter than the other three tragedies, but our experience in traversing it is so crowded and
intense that it leaves an impression not of brevity but of speed. It is the most vehement, the most
concentrated, perhaps we may say the most tremendous, of the tragedies
[note 1] See note 88.
back to index ^
2. THE ATMOSPHERE OF MACBETH.
A Shakespearean tragedy, as a rule, has a special tone or atmosphere of its own, quite perceptible,
however difficult to describe. The effect of this atmosphere is marked with unusual strength in
Macbeth. It is due to a variety of influences which combine with those just noticed, so that, acting
and reacting, they form a whole; and the desolation of the blasted heath, the design of the Witches,
the guilt in the hero's soul, the darkness of the night, seem to emanate from one and the same
source. This effect is strengthened by a multitude of small touches, which at the moment may be
little noticed but still leave their mark on the imagination. We may approach the consideration of
the characters and the action by distinguishing some of the ingredients of this general effect.
Darkness, we may even say blackness, broods over this tragedy. It is remarkable that almost all the
scenes, which at once recur to memory, take place either at night or in some dark spot. The vision
of the dagger, the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth,
all come in night-scenes. The Witches dance in the thick air of a storm, or, 'black and midnight
hags,' receive Macbeth in a cavern. The blackness of night is to the hero a thing of fear even of
horror; and that which he feels becomes the spirit of the play. The faint glimmerings of the western
sky at twilight are here menacing: it is the hour when the traveller hastens to reach safety in his inn,
and when Banquo rides homeward to meet his assassins; the hour when 'light thickens,' when'
night's black agents to their prey do rouse,' when the wolf begins to howl, and the owl to scream,
and withered murder steals forth to his work. Macbeth bids the stars hide their fires that his 'black'
desires may be concealed; Lady Macbeth calls on thick night to come, palled in the dunnest smoke
of hell. The moon is down and no stars shine when Banquo, dreading the dreams of the corning
night, goes unwillingly to bed, and leaves Macbeth to wait for the summons of the little bell. When
the next day should dawn, its light is 'stranded,' and 'darkness does the face of earth entomb.' In the
whole drama the sun seems to shine only twice: first, in the beautiful but ironical passage where
Duncan sees the swallows flitting round the castle of death; and, afterwards, when at the close the
avenging army gathers to rid the earth of its shame. Of the many slighter touches, which deepen
this effect, I notice only one. The failure of nature in Lady Macbeth is marked by her fear of
darkness; 'she has light by her continually.' And in the one phrase of fear that escapes her lips even
in sleep, it is of the darkness of the place of torment that she speaks.' [1]
The atmosphere of Macbeth, however, is not that of unrelieved blackness. On the contrary, as
compared with King Lear and its cold dim gloom, Macbeth leaves a decided impression of colour;
it is really the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour, sometimes vivid
and even glaring. They are the lights and colours of the thunder-storm in the first scene; of the
dagger hanging before Macbeth's eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch borne by
the servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the castle-court to his room; of the
torch, again, which Fleance carried to light his father to death, and which was dashed out by one of
the murderers; of the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the Ghost and the blanched cheeks
of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the boiling caldron from which the apparitions in the cavern
rose; of the taper which showed to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and blank eyes of
Lady Macbeth. And, above all, the colour is the colour of blood. It cannot be an accident that the
image of blood is forced upon us continually, not merely by the events themselves, but by full
descriptions, and even by reiteration of the word in unlikely parts of the dialogue. The Witches,
after their first wild i appearance, have hardly quitted the stage when there staggers onto it a'
bloody man,' gashed, with wounds. His tale is of a hero whose brandished steel smoked with
bloody execution, 'carved out a passage to his enemy,' and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the
chaps.' And then he tells of a second battle so bloody that the combatants seemed as if they 'meant
to bathe in reeking wounds.' What metaphors! What a dreadful image is that with which Lady
Macbeth greets us almost as she enters, when she prays the spirits of cruelty so to thicken her blood
that pity cannot flow along her veins! What pictures are those of the murderer appearing at
the door of the banquet-room with Banquo's 'blood upon his face '; of Banquo himself 'with twenty
trenched gashes on his head,' or' blood-bolter'd' and smiling in derision at his murderer; of
Macbeth, gazing at his hand, and watching it dye the whole green ocean red; of Lady Macbeth,
gazing at hers, and stretching it away from her face to escape the smell of blood that all the
perfumes of Arabia will not subdue! The most horrible lines in the whole tragedy are those of her
shuddering cry, 'Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' And
it is not only at such moments that these images occur. Even in the quiet conversation of Malcolm
and Macduff, Macbeth is imagined as holding a bloody sceptre and Scotland as a country bleeding
and receiving every day anew gash added to her wounds. It is as if the poet saw the whole story
through an ensanguined mist, and as if it stained the very blackness of the night. When Macbeth,
before Banquo's murder, invokes night to scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, and to tear in pieces
the great bond that keeps him pale, even the invisible hand that is to tear the bond is imagined as
covered with blood.
Let us observe another point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of the imagery in some of
these passages are characteristic of Macbeth almost throughout; and their influence contributes to
form its atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast and dashed to
death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell; of the earth shaking in fever; of the frame of
things disjointed; of sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out like
syllables of dolour; of the mind lying in restless ecstasy on a rack; of the mind full of scorpions; of
the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; all keep the imagination moving on a' wild and
violent sea,' while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on thoughts of peace and beauty.
In its language, as in its action, the drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are
present we see and hear a thunder-storm: when they are absent we hear of ship-wrecking storms
and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids;
of the frightful hurricane' of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which pity rides
like a new-born babe, or on which Heaven's cherubim are horsed. There is thus something
magnificently appropriate in the cry , Blow, wind! Come, wrack!' with which Macbeth, turning
from the sight of the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his throne on
a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings of storm.
Now all these agencies darkness, the lights and colours that illuminate it, the storm that rushes
through it, the violent and gigantic images conspire with the appearances of the Witches and the
Ghost to awaken horror, and in some degree also a supernatural dread. And to this effect other
influences contribute. The pictures called up by the mere words of the Witches stir the same
feelings, those, for example, of the spell-bound sailor driven tempest-tost for nine times nine weary
weeks, and never visited by sleep night or day; of the drop of poisonous foam that fonns on the
moon, and, falling to earth, is collected for pernicious ends; of the sweltering venom of the toad,
the finger of the babe killed at its birth by its own mother, the tricklings from the murderer's gibbet.
In Nature, again, something is felt to be at work, sympathetic with human guilt and supernatural
malice. She labours with portents.
Lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible,
burst from her. The owl clamours all through the night; Duncan's horses devour each other in
frenzy; the dawn comes, but no light with it. Common sights and sounds, the crying of crickets, the
croak of the raven, the light thickening after sunset, the home-coming of the rooks, are all ominous.
Then, as if to deepen these impressions, Shakespeare has concentrated attention on the obscurer
regions of man's being, on phenomena which make it seem that he is in the power of secret forces
lurking below, and independent of his consciousness and will: such as the relapse of Macbeth from
conversation into a reverie, during which he gazes fascinated at the image of murder drawing closer
and closer; the writing on his face of strange things he never meant to show, the pressure of
imagination heightening into illusion, like the vision of a dagger in the air, at first bright, then
suddenly splashed with blood, or the sound of a voice that cried 'Sleep no more,' and would not be
silenced. [2] To these are added other, and constant, allusions to sleep, man's strange half-conscious
life; to the misery of its withholding; to the terrible dreams of remorse; to the cursed thoughts from
which Banquo is free by day, but which tempt him in his sleep: and again to abnonnal disturbances
of sleep; in. the two men, of whom one during the murder of Duncan laughed in his sleep, and the
other raised a cry of murder; and in Lady Macbeth, who rises to re-enact in somnambulism those
scenes the memory of which is pushing her on to madness or suicide. All this has one effect, to
excite supernatural alarm and, even more, a dread of the presence of evil not only in its recognised
seat but all through and around our mysterious nature. Perhaps there is no other work equal to
Macbeth in the production of this effect. [3]
It is enhanced to take a last point by the use of a literary expedient. Not even in Richard III. which
in this, as in other respects, has resemblance’s to Macbeth, is there so much of Irony. I do not refer
to irony in the ordinary sense; to speeches, for example, where the speaker is intentionally ironical,
like that of Lennox in III. vi. I refer to irony on the part of the author himself, to ironical
juxtapositions of persons and events, and especially to the 'Sophoclean irony' by which a speaker is
made to use words bearing to the audience, in addition to his own meaning, a further and ominous
sense, hidden from himself and, usually, from the other persons on the stage. The very first words
uttered by Macbeth,
So foul and fair a day I have not seen,
are an example to which attention has often been drawn; for they startle the reader by recalling the
words of the Witches in the first scene,
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
When Macbeth, emerging from his murderous reverie, turns to the nobles saying, 'Let us toward the
King,' his words are innocent, but to the reader have a double meaning. Duncan's comment on the
treachery of Cawdor,
There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face:
He was a gentleman on whom I built
An absolute trust,
is interrupted [4] by the entrance of the traitor Macbeth, who is greeted with effusive gratitude and
a like 'absolute trust.' I have already referred to the ironical effect of the beautiful lines in which
Duncan and Banquo describe the castle they are about to enter. To the reader Lady Macbeth's light
words,
A little water clears us of this deed:
How easy is it then,
summon up the picture of the sleep-walking scene. The idea of the Porter's speech, in which he
imagines himself the keeper of hell-gate, shows the same irony. So does the contrast between the
obvious and the hidden meanings of the apparitions of the armed head, the bloody child, and the
child with the tree in his hand. It would be easy to add further examples. Perhaps the most striking
is the answer which Banquo, as he rides away, never to return alive, gives to Macbeth's reminder,
'Fail not our feast.' 'My lord, I will not,' he replies, and he keeps his promise. It cannot be by
accident that Shakespeare so frequently in this play uses a device, which contributes to excite the
vague fear of hidden forces operating on minds unconscious of their influence. [5]
[note I] 'Hell is murky' (v. i. 35). This, surely, is not meant for a scornful repetition of something
said long ago by Macbeth. He would hardly in those days have used an argument or expressed a
fear that could provoke nothing but contempt.
[note 2] Whether Banquo's ghost is a mere illusion, like the dagger, is discussed in Note FF .
[ note 3] In parts of this paragraph I am indebted to Hunter's Illustrations of Shakespeare.
[note 4] The line is a foot short
[note 5] It should be observed that in some cases the irony would escape an audience ignorant of
the story and watching the play for the first time, another indication that Shakespeare did not write
solely for immediate stage purposes.
back to index ^
3. MACBETH AND THE WITCHES
But of course he had for this purpose an agency more potent than any yet considered. It would be
almost an impertinence to attempt to describe anew the influence of the Witch-scenes on the
imagination of the reader. [ 1] Nor do I believe that among different readers this influence differs
greatly except in degree. But when critics begin to analyse the imaginative effect, and still more
when, going behind it, they try to determine the truth which lay for Shakespeare or lies for us in
these creations, they too often offer us results which, either through perversion or through
inadequacy, fail to correspond with that effect. This happens in opposite ways. On the one hand the
Witches, whose contribution to the 'atmosphere' of Macbeth can hardly be exaggerated, are credited
with far too great an influence upon the action; sometimes they are described as goddesses, or even
as fates, whom Macbeth is powerless to resist. And this is perversion. On the other hand, we are
told that, great as is their influence on the action, it is so because they are merely symbolic
representations of the unconscious or half-conscious guilt in Macbeth himself. And this is
inadequate. The few remarks I have to make may take the form of a criticism on these views( I) As to the former, Shakespeare took, as material for his purposes, the ideas about witch-craft
that he found existing in people around him and in books like Reginald Scot's Discovery (1584).
And he used these ideas without changing their substance at all. He selected and improved,
avoiding the merely ridiculous, dismissing (unlike Middleton) the sexually loathsome or
stimulating, rehandling and heightening whatever could touch the imagination with fear, horror,
and mysterious attraction. The Witches, that is to say, are not goddesses, or fates, or, in any way
whatever, supernatural beings. They are old women, poor and ragged, skinny and hideous, full of
vulgar spite, occupied in killing their neighbours' swine or revenging themselves on sailors' wives
who have refused them chestnuts. If Banquo considers their beards a proof that they are not
women, that only shows his ignorance: Sir Hugh Evans would have known better. [2] There is not
a syllable in Macbeth to imply that they are anything but women. But, again in accordance with the
popular ideas, they have received from evil spirits certain supernatural powers. They can' raise
haile, tempests, and hurtful weather; as lightening, thunder etc.' They can 'passe from place to place
in the aire invisible.' They can ' keepe divels and spirits in the likenesse of todes and cats,' Paddock
or Graymalkin. They can stransferre come in the blade from one place to another.' They can
'manifest unto others things hidden and lost, and foreshew things to come, and see them as though
they were present.' The reader will apply these phrases and sentences at once to passages in
Macbeth. They are all taken from Scot's first chapter, where he is retailing the popular superstitions
of his time; and, in regard to the Witches, Shakespeare mentions scarcely anything, if anything, that
was not to be found, of course in a more prosaic shape, either in Scot or in some other easily
accessible authority. [3] He read, to be sure, in Holinshed, his main source for the story of
Macbeth, that, according to the common opinion, the 'women' who met Macbeth 'were eyther the
weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) ye Goddesses of destinee, or els some Nimphes or Feiries.'
But what does that matter? What he read in his authority was absolutely nothing to his audience,
and remains nothing to us, unless he used what he read. And he did not use this idea. He used
nothing but the phrase 'weird sisters, '[ 4] which certainly no more suggested to a London audience
the Parcae of one mythology or the Noms of another than it does to-day. His Witches owe all their
power to the spirits; they are 'instruments of darkness'; the spirits are their 'masters' (IV. i. 63).
Fancy the fates having masters! Even if the passages where Hectate appears are Shakespeare's,[5]
that will not help the Witches; for they are subject to Hectate, who is herself a goddess, not a fate.
Next, while the influence of the Witches' prophecies on Macbeth is very great, it is quite clearly
shown to be an influence and nothing more. There is no sign whatever in the play that Shakespeare
meant the actions of Macbeth to be forced on him by an external power, whether that of the
Witches, or of their ' masters,' or of Hectate. It is needless therefore to insist that such a conception
would be in contradiction with his whole tragic practice. The prophecies of the Witches are
presented simply as dangerous circumstances with which Macbeth has to deal: they are
dramatically on the same level as the story of the Ghost in Hamlet, or the falsehoods told by Iago to
Othello. Macbeth is, in the ordinary sense, perfectly free in regard to them: and if we speak of
degrees of freedom, he is even more free than Hamlet, who was crippled by melancholy when the
Ghost appeared to him. That the influence of the first prophecies upon him came as much from
himself as from them is made abundantly clear by the obviously intentional contrast between him
and Banquo. Banquo, ambitious but perfectly honest, is scarcely even startled by them, and he
remains throughout the scene indifferent to them. But when Macbeth heard them he was not an
innocent man. Precisely how far his mind was guilty may be a question; but no innocent man
would have started, as he did, with a start of fear at the mere prophecy of a crown, or have
conceived thereupon immediately the thought of murder. Either this thought was not new to
him,[6] or he had cherished at least some vaguer dishonourable dream, the instantaneous
recurrence of which, at the moment of . his hearing the prophecy, revealed to him an inward and
terrifying guilt. In either case not only was he free to accept or resist the temptation, but the
temptation was already within him. We are admitting too much, therefore, when we compare him
with Othello, for Othello's mind was perfectly free from suspicion when his temptation came to
him. And we are admitting, again, too much when we use the word 'temptation' in reference to the
first prophecies of the Witches. Speaking strictly we must affirm that he was tempted only by
himself He speaks indeed of their 'supernatural soliciting '; but in fact they did not solicit. They
merely announced events: they hailed him as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King
hereafter . No connection of these announcements with any action of his was even hinted by them.
For all that appears, the natural death of an old man might have fulfilled the prophecy any day. [7]
In any case, the idea of fulfilling it by murder was entirely his own. [8]
When Macbeth sees the Witches again, after the murders of Duncan and Banquo, we observe,
however, a striking change. They no longer need to go and meet him; he seeks them out. He has
committed himself to his course of evil. Now accordingly they do 'solicit.' They prophesy, but they
also give advice: they bid him be bloody, bold, and secure, We have no hope that he will reject
their advice; but so far are they from having, even now, any power to compel him to accept it, that
they make careful preparations to deceive him into doing so. And, almost as though to intimate
how entirely the responsibility for his deeds still lies with Macbeth, Shakespeare makes his first act
after this interview one for which his tempters gave him not a hint the slaughter of Macduffs wife
and children.
To all this we must add that Macbeth himself nowhere betrays a suspicion that his action is, or has
been, thrust on him by an external power. He curses the Witches for deceiving him, but he never
attempts to shift to them the burden of his guilt. Neither has Shakespeare placed in the mouth of
any other character in this play such fatalistic expressions as may be found in King Lear and
occasionally elsewhere. He appears actually to have taken pains to make the natural psychological
genesis of Macbeth's crimes perfectly clear, and it was a most unfortunate notion of Schlegel's that
the Witches were required because natural agencies would have seemed too weak to drive such a
man as Macbeth to his first murder.
'Still,' it may be said,' the Witches did foreknow Macbeth's future; and what is foreknown is fixed;
and how can a man be responsible when his future is fixed?' With this question, as a speculative
one, we have no concern here; but, in so far as it relates to the play, I answer, first, that not one of
the things foreknown is an action. This is just as true of the later prophecies as of the first. That
Macbeth will be harmed by none of woman born, and will never be vanquished till Birnam Wood
shall come against him, involves (so far as we are informed) no action of his. It may be doubted,
indeed, whether Shakespeare would have introduced prophecies of Macbeth's deeds, even if it had
been convenient to do so; he would probably have felt that to do so would interfere with the interest
of the inward struggle and suffering. And, in the second place, Macbeth was not written for
students of metaphysics or theology, but for people at large; and, however it may be with
prophecies of actions, prophecies of mere events do not suggest to people at large any sort of
difficulty about responsibility. Many people, perhaps most, habitually think of their 'future' as
something fixed, and of themselves as 'free.' The Witches nowadays take a room in Bond Street
and charge a guinea; and when the victim enters they hail him the possessor of re 1000 a year or
prophesy to him of journeys, wives, and children. But though he is struck dumb by their prescience,
it . does not even cross his mind that he is going to lose his glorious 'freedom' not though journeys
and marriages imply much more agency on his part than anything foretold to Macbeth. This whole
difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer , any
interest in speculative problems concerning foreknowledge, pre-destination and freedom.
(2) We may deal more briefly with the opposite interpretation. According to it the Witches and
their prophecies are to be taken merely as symbolical representations of thoughts and desires which
have slumbered in Macbeth's breast and now rise into consciousness and confront him. With this
idea, which springs from the wish to get rid of a mere external supernaturalism, and to find a
psychological and spiritual meaning in that which the groundlings probably received as hard facts,
one may feel sympathy. But it is evident that it is rather a 'philosophy' of the Witches than an
immediate dramatic apprehension of them; and even so it will be found both incomplete and, in
other respects, inadequate.
It is incomplete because it cannot possibly be applied to all the facts. Let us grant that it will apply
to the most important prophecy, that of the crown; and that the later warning which Macbeth
receives, to beware of Macduff, also answers to something in his own breast and 'harps his fear
aright.' But there we have to stop. Macbeth had evidently no suspicion of that treachery in Cawdor
through which he himself became Thane; and who will suggest that he had any ideas however subconscious, about Birnam Wood or the man not born of woman? It may be held and rightly, I think
that the prophecies which answer to nothing inward, the prophecies which are merely supernatural,
produce, now at any rate, much less imaginative effect than the others, even that they are in
Macbeth an element which was of an age and not for all time; but still they are there, and they are
essential to the plot. [9] And as the theory under consideration will not apply to them at all, it is not
likely that it gives an adequate account even of those prophecies to which it can in some measure
be applied.
It is inadequate here chiefly because it is much too narrow. The Witches and their prophecies, if
they are to be rationalised or taken symbolically, must represent not only the evil slumbering in the
hero's soul, but all those obscurer influences of the evil around him in the world which aid his own
ambition and the incitements of his wife. Such influences, even if we put aside all belief in evil
'spirits,' are as certain, momentous, and terrifying facts as the presence of inchoate evil in the soul
itself; and if we exclude all reference to these facts from our idea of the Witches, it will be greatly
impoverished and will certainly fail to correspond with the imaginative effect. The union of the
outward and inward here may be compared with something of the same kind in Greek poetry.[IO]
In the first Book of the Iliad we are told that, when Agamemnon threatened to take Briseis from
Achilles, ' grief came upon Peleus' son, and his heart within his shaggy breast was divided in
counsel, whether to draw his keen blade from his thigh and set the company aside and so slay
Atreides, or to assuage his anger and curb his soul. While yet he doubted thereof in heart and soul,
and was drawing his great sword from his sheath, Athene came to him from heaven, sent forth of
the white-armed goddess Hera, whose heart loved both alike and had care for them. She stood
behind Peleus' son and caught him by his golden hair, to him only visible and of the rest no man
beheld her.' And at her bidding he mastered his wrath, 'and stayed his heavy hand on the silver hilt,
and thrust the great sword back into the sheath, and was not disobedient to the saying of
Athene.'[ll] The succour of the goddess here only strengthens an inward movement in the mind of
Achilles, but we should lose something besides a poetic effect if for that reason we struck her out
of the account. We should lose the idea that the inward powers of the soul answer in their essence
to vaster powers without, which support them and assure the effect of their exertion. So it is in
Macbeth.[12] The words of the Witches are fatal to the hero only because there is in him something
which leaps into light at the sound of them; but they are at the same time the witness of forces
which never cease to work in the world around him, and, on the instant of his surrender to them,
entangle him inextricably in the web of Fate. If the inward connection is once realised (and
Shakespeare has left us no excuse for missing it ), we need not fear, and indeed shall scarcely be
able, to exaggerate the effect of the Witch-scenes in heightening and deepening the sense of fear ,
horror, and mystery which pervades the atmosphere of the tragedy.
[note I] Their influence on spectators is, I believe, very inferior. These scenes, like the Stormscenes in King Lear, belong properly to the world of imagination.
note 2] 'By yea and no, I think the 'oman is a witch indeed: I like not when a 'oman has a great
peard' (Merry Wives, IV. ii. 202).
[note 3] Even the metaphor in the lines (II. iii. 27), What should be spoken here, where our fate Hid
in an auger -hole, may rush and seize us? was probably suggested by the words in Scot's first
chapter, I They can go in and out at awger-holes.'
[note 4] Once, I weird women.' Whether Shakespeare knew that' weird I meant 'fateful' we cannot
tell, but it is probable that he did. The word occurs six times in Macbeth (it does not occur
elsewhere in Shakespeare). The first three times it is spelt in the Folio weyward, the last three
weyard. This may suggest a miswriting or misprinting of weyward; but, as that word is always spelt
in the Folio either rightly or waiward" it is more likely that the weyward and weyard of Macbeth
are the copyist's or printer's misreading of Shakespeare's weird or weyrd.
[note 5] The doubt as to these passages (see Note Z.) does not arise from the mere appearance of
this figure. The idea of Hectate's connection with witches appears also at II. i. 52, and she is
mentioned again at nl. ii. 41 (cf Mid. Night's Dream v. i. 391, for her connection with fairies). It is
part of the common traditional notion of the heathen gods being now devils. Scot refers to it several
times. See the notes in the Clarendon Press edition on Ill. v. I" or those in Furness's Variorum.
Of course in the popular notion the witch's spirits are devils or servants of Satan. If Shakespeare
openly introduces this idea only in Banquo's phrases' the instruments of darkness, and' what! can
the devil speak true ? ' the reason is probably his unwillingness to give too much prominence to
distinctively religious ideas.
[note 6] If this paragraph is true, some of the statements even of Lamb and of Coleridge about the
Witches are, taken literally, incorrect. What these critics, and notably the former, describe so well
is the poetic aspect abstracted from the remainder; and in describing this they attribute to the
Witches themselves what belongs really to the complex of Witches, Spirits, and Hectate. For the
purposes of imagination, no doubt, this inaccuracy is of small consequence; and it is these purposes
that matter.
[ note 7] See Note CC.
[note2, p 344] The proclamation of Malcolm as Duncan's successor (I. iv.) changes the position,
but the design of murder is prior to this.
[note 8] Schlegel's assertion that the first thought of the murder comes from the Witches is thus in
flat contradiction with the text. (The sentence in which he asserts this is, 1 may observe, badly
mistranslated in the English version, which, wherever I have consulted the original, shows itself
untrustworthy. It ought to be revised, for Schlegel is well worth reading. )
[note 9] It is noticeable that Dr. Forman, who saw the play in 1610 and wrote a sketch of it in his
journal, says nothing about the later prophecies. Perhaps he despised them as mere stuff for the
groundlings. The reader will find, I think, that the great poetic effect of Act IV. Sc. i. depends much
more on the 'harm' which precedes Macbeth's entrance, and on Macbeth himself, than on the
predictions.
[note 10] This comparison was suggested by a passage in Hegel's Aesthetik, i. 291 ff.
[note 11] n. i. 188ff. (Leafs translation).
[note 12] The supernaturalism of the modern poet, indeed, is more 'external' than that of the
ancient. We have already had evidence of this, and shall find more when we come to the character
of Banquo.
back to index ^
4. SIMILARITIES BETWEEN MACBETH AND LADY MACBETH
From this murky background stand out the two great terrible figures, which dwarf all the remaining
characters of the drama. Both are sublime, and both inspire, far more than the other tragic heroes,
the feeling of awe. They are never detached in imagination from the atmosphere, which surrounds
them and adds to their grandeur and terror. It is, as it were, continued into their souls. For within
them is all that we felt without the darkness of night, lit with the flame of tempest and the hues of
blood, and haunted by wild and direful shapes, 'murdering ministers,' spirits of remorse, and
maddening visions of peace lost and judgement to come. The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here,
as always, is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalise, to conceive Macbeth, for
example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend.
These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition; and to a considerable
extent they are alike. The disposition of each is high, proud, and commanding. They are born to
rule if not to reign. They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors. They are not children
of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world. We observe in them no love of country, and
no interest in the welfare of anyone outside their family. Their habitual thoughts and aims are, and,
we imagine, long have been, all of station and power. And though in both there is something, and
in one much, of what is higher honour, conscience, humanity they do not live consciously in the
light of these things or speak their language. Not that they are egoists, like lago; or, if they are
egoists, theirs is an egolsme a deux. They have . no separate ambitions. [ I] They support and love
one another. They suffer together. And if, as time goes on, they drift a little apart, they are not
vulgar souls, to be alienated and recriminate when they experience the fruitlessness of their
ambition. They remain to the end tragic, even grand.
So far there is much likeness between them. Otherwise they are contrasted, and the action is built
upon this contrast. Their attitudes towards the projected murder of Duncan are quite different; and
it produces in them equally different effects. In consequence, they appear in the earlier part of the
playas of equal importance, if indeed Lady Macbeth does not overshadow her husband; but
afterwards she retires more and more into the background, and he becomes unmistakably the
leading figure. His is indeed far the more complex character: and I will speak of it first.
[ note I] The assertion that Lady Macbeth sought a crown for herself, or sought anything for
herself, apart from her husband, is absolutely unjustified by anything in the play. It is based on a
sentence of Holinshed's which Shakespeare did not use.
back to index ^
5. THE CHARACTER OF MACBETH
Macbeth, the cousin of a King mild, just, and beloved, but now too old to lead his army, is
introduced to us as a general of extraordinary prowess, who has covered himself with glory in
putting down a rebellion and repelling the invasion of a foreign army. In these conflicts he showed
great personal courage, a quality which he continues to display throughout the drama in regard to
all plain dangers. It is difficult to be sure of his customary demeanour, for in the play we see him
either in what appears to be an exceptional relation to his wife, or else in the throes of remorse and
desperation; but from his behaviour during his journey home after the war, from his later
conversations with Lady Macbeth and from his language to the murderers of Banquo and to others,
we imagine him as a great warrior, somewhat masterful, rough, and abrupt, a man to inspire some
fear and much admiration. He was thought 'honest,' or honourable; he was trusted, apparently, by
everyone; Macduff, a man of the highest integrity, , loved him well.' And there was, in fact, much
good in him. We have no warrant, I think, for describing him, with many writers, as of a 'noble'
nature, like Hamlet or Othello;[l] but he had a keen sense both of honour and of the worth of a
good name. The phrase, again, 'too much of the milk of human kindness,' is applied to him in
impatience by his wife, who did not fully understand him; but certainly he was far from devoid of
humanity and pity.
At the same time he was exceedingly ambitious. He must have been so by temper. The tendency
must have been greatly strengthened by his marriage. When we see him, it has been further
stimulated by his remarkable success and by the consciousness of exceptional powers and merit. It
becomes a passion. The course of action suggested by it is extremely perilous: it sets his good
name, his position, and even his life on the hazard. It is also abhorrent to his better feelings. Their
defeat in the struggle with ambition leaves him utterly wretched, and would have kept him so,
however complete had been his outward success and security .On the other hand, his passion for
power and his instinct of self-assertion are so vehement that no inward misery could persuade him
to relinquish the fruits of crime, or to advance from remorse to repentance.
In the character as so far sketched there is nothing very peculiar, though the strength of the forces
contending in it is unusual. But there is in Macbeth one marked peculiarity, the true apprehension
of which is the key to Shakespeare's conception.[2]. This bold ambitious man of action has within
certain limits, the imagination of a poet, an imagination on the one hand extremely sensitive to
impressions of a certain kind, and, on the other, productive of violent disturbance both of mind and
body. Through it he is kept in contact with supernatural impressions and is liable to supernatural
fears. And through it, especially, come to him the intimations of conscience and honour. Macbeth's
better nature to put the matter for clearness' sake too broadly instead of speaking to him in the overt
language of moral ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which alarm
and horrify .His imagination is thus the best of him, something usually deeper and higher than his
conscious thoughts; and if he had obeyed it he would have been safe. But his wife quite
misunderstands it, and he himself understands it only in part. The terrifying images which deter
him from crime and follow its commission, and which are really the protest of his deepest self,
seem to his wife the creations of mere nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the
dread of vengeance or the restlessness of insecurity.[3]. His conscious or reflective mind, that is,
moves chiefly among considerations of outward success and failure, while his inner being is
convulsed by conscience. And his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in the
interpretations of actors and critics, who represent him as a coward, cold blooded, calculating, and
pitiless, who shrinks from crime simply because it is dangerous, and suffers afterwards simply
because he is not safe. In reality his courage is frightful. He strides from crime to crime, though his
soul never ceases to bar his advance with shapes of terror, or to clamour in his ears that he is
murdering his peace and casting away his 'eternal jewel.'
It is of the first importance to realise the strength, and also (what has not been so clearly
recognised) the limits, of Macbeth's imagination. It is not the universal meditative imagination of
Hamlet. He came to see in man, as Hamlet sometimes did, the 'quintessence of dust'; but he must
always have been incapable of Hamlet's reflections on man's noble reason and infinite faculty, or of
seeing with Hamlet's eyes 'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
golden fire.' Nor could he feel, like Othello, the romance of war or the infinity of love. He shows
no sign of any unusual sensitiveness to the glory or beauty in the world or the soul; and it is partly
for this reason that we have no inclination to love him, and that we regard him with more of awe
than of pity. His imagination is excitable and intense, but narrow. That which stimulates it is,
almost solely, that which thrills with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear [4]. There is a
famous passage late in the play (v. v. 10) which is here very significant, because it refers to a time
before his conscience was burdened, and so shows his native disposition:
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a nightshriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rise and stir
As life were in't.
This 'ime' must have been in his youth, or at least before we see him. And, in the drama, everything
which terrifies him is of this character, only it has now a deeper and a' moral significance. Palpable
dangers leave him unmoved or fill him with fire. He does himself mere justice when he asserts he
'dare do all that may become a man,' or when he exclaims to Banquo's ghost,
What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble.
What appals him is always the image of his own guilty heart or bloody deed, or some image which
derives from them its terror or gloom. These, when they arise, hold him spell-bound and possess
him wholly, like a hypnotic trance which is at the same time the ecstasy of a poet. As the first'
horrid image' of Duncan's murder of himself murdering Duncan rises from unconsciousness and
confronts him, his hair stands on end and the outward scene vanishes from his eyes. Why? For fear
of' consequences’? The idea is ridiculous. Or because the deed is bloody? The man who with his'
smoking' steel 'carved out his passage' to the rebel leader, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the
chaps,' would hardly be frightened by blood. How could fear of consequences make the dagger he
is to use hang suddenly glittering before him in the air, and then as suddenly dash it with gouts of
blood? Even when he talks of consequences, and declares that if he were safe against them he
would Jump the life to come,' his imagination bears witness against him, and shows us that what
really holds him back is the hideous vileness of the deed:
He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Wi1l plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow thou horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
It may be said that he is here thinking of the horror that others will feel at the deed--- thinking
therefore of consequences. Yes, but could he realise thus how horrible the deed would look to
others if it were not equally horrible to himself?
It is the same when the murder is done. He is well-nigh mad with horror, but it is not the horror of
detection. It is not he who thinks of washing his hands or getting his nightgown on. He has brought
away the daggers he should have left on the pillows of the grooms, but what does he care for that?
What he thinks of is that, when he heard one of the men awaked from sleep say' God bless us,' he
could not say Amen'; for his imagination presents to him the parching of his throat as an immediate
judgement from heaven. His wife heard the owl scream and the crickets cry; but what he heard was
the voice that first cried 'Macbeth doth murder sleep,' and then, a minute later, with a change of
tense, denounced on him, as if his three names gave him three personalities to suffer in, the doom
of sleeplessness:
Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.
There comes a sound of knocking. It should be perfectly familiar to him; but he knows not whence,
or from what world, it comes. He looks down at his hands, and starts violently: 'What hands are
here?’ For they seem alive, they move, they mean to pluck out his eyes. He looks at one of them
again; it does not move; but the blood upon it is enough to dye the whole ocean red. What has all
this to do with fear of' consequences '? It is his soul speaking in the only shape in which it can
speak freely, that of imagination.
So long as Macbeth's imagination is active, we watch him fascinated; we feel suspense, horror,
awe; in which are latent, also, admiration and sympathy. But so soon as it is quiescent these
feelings vanish. He is no longer 'infirm of purpose': he becomes domineering, even brutal, or he
becomes a cool pitiless hypocrite. He is generally said to be a very bad actor, but this is not wholly
true. Whenever his imagination stirs, he acts badly. It so possesses him, and is so much stronger
than his reason, that his face betrays him, and his voice utters the most improbable untruths [5] or
the most artificial rhetoric.[6] But when it is asleep he is firm, self-controlled and practical, as in
the conversation where he skilfully elicits from Banquo that information about his movements
which is required for the successful arrangement of his murder. [7] Here he is hateful; and so he is
in the conversation with the murderers, who are not professional cut-throats but old soldiers, and
whom, without a vestige of remorse, he beguiles with calumnies against Banquo and with such
appeals as his wife had used to him.[8] On the other hand, we feel much pity as well as anxiety in
the scene (1. vii. ) where she overcomes his opposition to the murder; and we feel it (though his
imagination is not specially active) because this scene shows us how little he understands himself.
This is his great misfortune here. Not that he fails to realise in reflection the baseness of the deed
(the soliloquy with which the scene opens shows that he does not). But he has never, to put it
pedantically, accepted as the principle of his conduct the morality, which takes shape in his
imaginative fears. Had he done so, and said plainly to his wife, 'The thing is vile, and, however
much I have sworn to do it, I will not,' she would have been helpless; for all her arguments proceed
on the assumption that there is for them no such point of view. Macbeth does approach this position
once, when resenting the accusation of cowardice, he answers,
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
She feels in an instant that everything is at stake, and, ignoring the point, overwhelms him with
indignant and contemptuous personal reproach. But he yields to it because he is himself halfashamed of that answer of his, and because, for want of habit, the simple idea which it expresses
has no hold on him comparable to the force it acquires when it becomes incarnate in visionary fears
and warnings. .
Yet these were so insistent, and they offered to his ambition a resistance so strong, that it is
impossible to regard him as falling through the blindness or delusion of passion. On the contrary,
he himself feels with such intensity the enormity of his purpose that, it seems clear, neither his
ambition nor yet the prophecy of the Witches would ever without the aid of Lady Macbeth have
overcome this feeling. As it is, the deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or sense of
glory, done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling duty; and, the instant it is finished, its
futility is revealed to Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand. As he
staggers from the scene he mutters in despair,
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st.
When, half an hour later, he returns with Lennox from the room of the murder, he breaks out:
Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of
This is no mere acting. The language here has none of the false rhetoric of his merely hypocritical
speeches. It is meant to deceive, but it utters at the same time his profoundest feeling. And this he
can henceforth never hide from himself for long. However he may try to drown it in further
enormities, he hears it murmuring,
Duncan is in his grave:
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:
or,
better be with the dead:
or,
I have lived long enough:
and it speaks its last words on the last day of his life:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
How strange that this judgement on life, the despair of a man who had knowingly made mortal war
on his own soul, should be frequently quoted as Shakespeare's own judgement, and should even be
adduced, in serious criticism, as a proof of his pessimism!
It remains to look a little more fully at the history of Macbeth after the murder of Duncan. Unlike
his first struggle this history excites little suspense or anxiety on his account: we have now no hope
for him. But it is an engrossing spectacle, and psychologically it is perhaps the most remarkable
exhibition of the development of a character to be found in Shakespeare's tragedies.
That heart-sickness which comes from Macbeth's perception of the futility of his crime, and which
never leaves him for long, is not, however, his habitual state. It could not be so, for two reasons. In
the first place the consciousness of guilt is stronger in him than the consciousness of failure and it
keeps him in a perpetual agony of restlessness, and forbids him simply to droop and pine. His mind
is 'full of scorpions.' He cannot sleep. He 'keeps alone,' moody and savage. 'All that is within him
does condemn itself for being there There is a fever in his blood which urges him to ceaseless
action in the search for oblivion. And in the second place, ambition, the love of power the instinct
of self -assertion, are much too potent in Macbeth to permit him to resign, even in spirit the prize
for which he has put rancours in the vessel of his peace. The will to live' is mighty in him The
forces which impelled him to aim at the crown re-assert themselves. He faces the world, and his
own conscience, desperate, but never dreaming of acknowledging defeat. He will see 'the frame of
things disjoint' first. He challenges fate into the lists.
The result is frightful. He speaks no more, as before Duncan's murder, of honour or pity. That
sleepless torture, he tells himself, is nothing but the sense of insecurity and the fear of retaliation. If
only he were safe, it would vanish. And he looks about for the cause of his fear; and his eye falls on
Banquo. Banquo, who cannot fail to suspect him, has not fled or turned against him: Banquo has
become his chief counsellor. Why? Because, he answers, the kingdom was promised to Banquo's
children. Banquo, then, is waiting to attack him, to make a way for them. The 'bloody instructions'
he himself taught when he murdered Duncan, are about to return, as he said they would, to plague
the inventor. This then, he tells himself, is the fear that will not let him sleep; and it will die with
Banquo. There is no hesitation now and no remorse: he has nearly learned his lesson. He hastens
feverishly, not to murder Banquo, but to procure his murder: some strange idea is in his mind that
the thought of the dead man will not haunt him, like the memory of Duncan, if the deed is done by
other hands. [9]. The deed is done: but, instead of peace descending on him, from the depths of his
nature his half-murdered conscience rises; his deed confronts him in the apparition of Banquo's
Ghost, and the horror of the night of his first murder returns. But, alas, it has less power, and he has
more will. Agonised and trembling, he still faces this rebel image, and it yields:
Why, so: being gone,
I am a man again.
Yes, but his secret is in the hands of the assembled lords. And, worse, this deed is as futile as the
first. For, though Banquo is dead and even his Ghost is conquered, that inner torture is unassuaged.
But he will not bear it. His guests have hardly left him when he turns roughly to his wife:
How say'st thou, that Macduff denies his person
At our great bidding?
Macduff it is that spoils his sleep. He shall perish, he and aught else that bars the road to peace.
For mine own good
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
Strange things I have in head that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
She answers, sick at heart,
You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
No doubt: but he has found the way to it now:
Come, we'll to sleep. My strange and self abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use:
We are yet but young in deed.
What a change from the man who thought of Duncan's virtues, and of pity like a naked new-born
babe! What a frightful clearness of self-consciousness in this descent to hell, and yet what a furious
force in the instinct of life and self-assertion that drives him on!
He goes to seek the Witches. He will know, by the worst means, the worst. He has no longer any
awe of them.
How now, you secret, black and midnight hags!
so he greets them, and at once he demands and threatens. They tell him he is right to fear Macduff.
They tell him to fear nothing, for none of woman born can harm him. He feels that the two
statements are at variance; infatuated, suspects no double meaning; but, that he may 'sleep in spite
of thunder,' determines not to spare Macduff But his heart throbs to know one thing, and he forces
from the Witches the vision of Banquo's children crowned. The old intolerable thought returns, 'for
Banquo's issue have I, filed my mind'; and with it, for all the absolute security apparently promised
him, there returns that inward fever. Will nothing quiet it? Nothing but destruction. Macduff, one
comes to tell him, has escaped him; but that does not matter: he can still destroy: [10]
And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done
The castle of Macduff will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o' the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in's line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I'll do before this purpose cool.
But no more sights!
No, he need fear no more 'sights.' The Witches have done their work, and after this purposeless
butchery his own imagination will trouble him no more. [ 11] He has dealt his last blow at the
conscience and pity which spoke through it.
The whole flood of evil in his nature is now let loose. He becomes an open tyrant, dreaded by
everyone about him, and a terror to his country. She 'sinks beneath the yoke.'
Each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face.
She weeps, she bleeds, 'and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.' She is not the mother of
her children, but their grave;
where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile:
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
Are made, not mark'd.
For this wild rage and furious cruelty we are prepared; but vices of another kind start up as he
plunges on his downward way.
I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious,
says Malcolm; and two of these epithets surprise us. who would have expected avarice or lechery
[12] in Macbeth? His ruin seems complete.
Yet it is never complete. To the end he never totally loses our sympathy; we never feel towards him
as we do to those who appear the born children of darkness. There remains something sublime in
the defiance with which, even when cheated of his last hope, he faces earth and hell and heaven.
Nor would any soul to whom evil was congenial be capable of that heart-sickness which overcomes
him when he thinks of the 'honour, love, obedience, troops of friends' which' he must not look to
have' (and which Iago would never have cared to have), and contrasts with them
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not,
(and which lago would have accepted with indifference). Neither can I agree with those who find in
his reception of the news of his wife's death proof of alienation or utter carelessness. There is no
proof of these in such words as
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word,
coming as they do from a man already in some measure prepared for such news, and now
transported by the frenzy of his last fight for life. He has no time now to feel. [13] Only, as he
thinks of the morrow when time to feel will come -if anything comes, the vanity of all hopes and
forward-lookings sinks deep into his soul with an infinite weariness, and he murmurs,
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a touch of tragic grandeur,
rests upon him. The evil he has desperately embraced continues to madden or to wither his inmost
heart. No experience in the world could bring him to glory in it or make his peace with it, or to
forget what he once was and lago and Goneril never were.
[note 1] The word is used of him (I. ii. 67), but not in a way that decides this question or even bears
on it.
[note 2] This view, thus generally stated, is not original, but I cannot say who first stated it.
[note 3] The latter, and more important, point was put quite clearly by Coleridge.
[note 4] It is the consequent insistence on the idea of fear, and the frequent repetition of the
word, that have principally led to misinterpretation.
[note 5] E.g. I iii. 149, where he excuses his abstraction by saying that his 'dull brain was wrought
with things forgotten,' when nothing could be more natural than that he should be thinking of his
new honour.
[note 6] E.g. in I. iv. This is so also in II iii 114 if, though here there is some real imaginative
excitement mingled with the rhetorical antitheses and balanced clauses and forced bombast.
[ note 7] III.i. Lady Macbeth herself could not more naturally have introduced at intervals the
questions 'Ride you this afternoon?' (1. 19), , Is't far you ride ? ' (1.24), , Goes Fleance with
you?'(1.36).
[note 8] We feel here, however, an underlying subdued frenzy, which awakes some sympathy.
There is an almost unendurable impatience expressed even in the rhythm of many of the lines; e.g.:
Well then, now
Have you consider'd of my speeches? Know
That it was he in the times past which held you
So under fortune, which you thought had been
Our innocent self: this I made good to you,
In our last conference, pass'd in probation with you,
How you were borne in hand, how cross'd, the instruments,
Who wrought with them and all things else that might
To half a soul and to a notion crazed
Say, 'Thus did Banquo.'
This effect is heard to the end of the play in Macbeth's less poetic speeches, and leaves the same
impression of burning energy, though not of imaginative exaltation, as his great speeches. In these
we find either violent, huge, sublime imagery, or a torrent of figurative expressions (as in the
famous lines about' the innocent sleep '). Our impressions as to the diction of the play are largely
derived from these speeches of the hero, but not wholly so. The writing almost throughout leaves
an impression of intense, almost feverish, activity.
[note 9] See his first words to the Ghost: 'Thou canst not say I did it.'
[note 10] For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts.Paradise Lost, ix. 129.
Milton's portrait of Satan's misery here, and at the beginning of Book IV., might well have been
suggested by Macbeth. Coleridge, after quoting Duncan's speech, I. iv 35 ff, says: ' It is a fancy; but
I can never read this, and the following speeches of Macbeth, without involuntarily thinking of the
Miltonic Messiah and Satan.' I doubt if it was a mere fancy. (It will be remembered that Milton
thought at one time of writing a tragedy on Macbeth. )
[ note 11] The immediate reference in 'But no more sights' is doubtless to the visions called up by
the Witches; but one of these, the 'blood-bolter'd Banquo,' recalls to him the vision of the preceding
night, of which he had said,
You make me strange
Even to the disposition that I owe,
When now I think you can behold such sights,
And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,
When mine is blanch'd with fear.
[note 12] 'Luxurious' and 'luxury' are used by Shakespeare only in this older sense. It must be
remembered that these lines are spoken by Malcolm, but it seems likely that they are meant to be
taken as true throughout.
[ note 13] I do not at all suggest that his love for his wife remains what it was when he greeted her
with the words' My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night.' He has greatly changed; she has
ceased to help him, sunk in her own despair; and there is no intensity of anxiety in the questions he
puts to the doctor about her. But his love for her was probably never unselfish, never the love of
Brutus, who, in somewhat similar circumstances, uses, on the death of Cassius, words which
remind us of Macbeth's:
I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.
For the opposite strain of feeling cf Sonnet 90:
Then hate me if thou wilt, if ever, now,
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross.
back to index ^
6. THE CHARACTER OF LADY MACBETH
To regard Macbeth as a play, like the love-tragedies Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra,
in which there are two central characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But
Shakespeare himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of Macbeth is greater
than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth not only appears more than in the second but
also exerts the ultimate deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady
Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure that Shakespeare
drew. Sharing, as we have seen, certain traits with her husband she is at once clearly distinguished
from him by an inflexibility of will, which appears to hold imagination, feeling, and conscience
completely in check. To her the prophecy of things that will be becomes instantaneously the
determination that they shall be:
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
That thou art promised.
She knows her husband's weakness, how he scruples 'to catch the nearest way' to the object he
desires; and she sets herself without a trace of doubt or conflict to counteract this weakness. To her
there is no separation between will and deed; and, as the deed falls in part to her, she is sure it will
be done:
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.
On the moment of Macbeth's rejoining her, after braving infinite dangers and winning infinite
praise, without a syllable on these subjects or a word of affection, she goes straight to her purpose
and permits him to speak of nothing else. She takes the superior position and assumes the direction
of affairs, appears to assume it even more than she really can, that she may spur him on. She
animates him by picturing the deed as heroic, 'this night's great business,' or 'our great quell,' while
she ignores its cruelty and faithlessness. She bears down his faint resistance by presenting him with
a prepared scheme, which may remove from him the terror and danger of deliberation. She rouses
him with a taunt no man can bear, and least of all a soldier, the word' coward.' When he still
hesitates, she appeals even to his love for her:
from this time
Such I account thy love;
such, that is, as the protestations of a drunkard. Her reasonings are mere sophisms; they could
persuade no man. It is not by them, it is by personal appeals, through the admiration she extorts
from him, and through sheer force of will, that she impels him to the deed. Her eyes are fixed upon
the crown and the means to it; she does not attend to the consequences. Her plan of laying the guilt
upon the chamberlains is invented on the spur of the moment, and simply to satisfy her husband.
Her true mind is heard in the ringing cry with which she answers his question, 'Will it not be
received. ..that they have done it ? ,
Who dares receive it other? !
And this is repeated in the sleep-walking scene: ' What need we fear who knows it, when none can
call our power to account?' Her passionate courage sweeps him off his feet. His decision is taken in
a moment of enthusiasm:
Bring forth men-children only;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.
And even when passion has quite died away her will remains supreme. In presence of
overwhelming horror and danger, in the murder scene and the banquet scene, her self-control is
perfect. When the truth of what she has done dawns on her, no word of complaint, scarcely a word
of her own suffering, not a single word of her own as apart from his, escapes her when others are
by. She helps him, but never asks his help. She leans on nothing but herself and from the beginning
to the end though she makes once or twice a slip in acting her parther will never fails her. Its grasp
upon her nature may destroy her, but it is never relaxed. We are sure that she never betrayed her
husband or herself by a word or even a look save in sleep. However appalling she may be, she is
sublime.
In the earlier scenes of the play this aspect of Lady Macbeth's character is far the most prominent.
And if she seems invincible she seems also inhuman. We find no trace of pity for the kind old king;
no consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder; no sense of . the value of the lives of
the wretched men on whom the guilt is to be laid; no shrinking even from the condemnation or
hatred of the world. Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or a
'fiend-like queen,' as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the sleep-walking scene would be an
impossibility .The one woman could never become the other. And in fact, if we look below the
surface, there is evidence enough in the earlier scenes of preparation for the later. I do not mean
that Lady Macbeth was naturally humane. There is nothing in the play to show this and several
passages subsequent to the murder-scene supply proof to the contrary. One is that where she
exclaims, on being informed of Duncan's murder,
Woe, alas!
What, in our house?
This mistake in acting shows that she does not even know what the natural feeling in such
circumstances would be; and Banquo's curt answer, 'Too cruel anywhere,' is almost a reproof of her
insensibility. But, admitting this, we have in the first place to remember, in imagining the opening
scenes, that she is deliberately bent on counteracting the 'human kindness' of her husband, and also
that she is evidently not merely inflexibly determined but in a condition of abnormal excitability.
That exaltation in the project that is so entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When
she tries to help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving herself as much as
him. Their attainment of the crown presents itself to her , perhaps has long presented itself, as
something so glorious, and she has fixed her will upon it so completely, that for the time she sees
the enterprise in no other light than that of its greatness. When she soliloquises,
Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it; what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily,
one sees that 'ambition' and 'great' and 'highly' and even 'illness' are to her simply terms of praise,
and' holily , and' human kindness' simply terms of blame. Moral distinctions do not in this
exaltation exist for her; or rather they are inverted; 'good' means to her the crown and whatever is
required to obtain it, 'evil' whatever stands in the way of its attainment. This attitude of mind is
evident even when she is alone, though it becomes still more pronounced when she has to work
upon her husband. And it persists until her end is attained. But, without being exactly forced, it
betrays a strain, which could not long endure.
Besides this, in these earlier scenes the traces of feminine weakness and human feeling, which
account for her later failure, are not absent. Her will, it is clear, was exerted to overpower not only
her husband's resistance but also some resistance in herself. Imagine Goneril uttering the famous
words,
Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done 't.
They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment impatiently, as though she regretted her weakness:
but it was there. And in reality, quite apart from this recollection of her father, she could never have
done the murder if her husband had failed. She had to nerve herself with wine to give her 'boldness'
enough to go through her minor part. That appalling invocation to the spirits of evil, to un-sex her
and fill her from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty, tells the same tale of determination
to crush the inward protest. Goneril had no need of such a prayer. In the utterance of the frightful
lines,
I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this,
her voice should doubtless rise until it reaches, in' dash'd the brains out,' an almost hysterical
scream.[l] These lines show unmistakably that strained exaltation which, as soon as the end is
reached, vanishes, never to return.
The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of will. It is an error to
regard her as remarkable on the intellectual side. In acting a part she shows immense self-control,
but not much skill. Whatever may be thought of the plan of attributing the murder of Duncan to the
chamberlains, to lay their bloody daggers on their pillows, as if they were determined to advertise
their guilt, was a mistake, which can be accounted for only by the excitement of the moment. But
the limitations of her mind appear most in the point where, she is most strongly contrasted with
Macbeth, in her comparative dullness of imagination. I say 'comparative,' for she sometimes uses
highly poetic language, as indeed does everyone in Shakespeare who has any greatness of soul. Nor
is she perhaps less imaginative than the majority of his heroines. But as compared with her husband
she has little imagination. It is not simply that she suppresses what she has. To her, things remain at
the most terrible moment precisely what they were at the calmest, plain facts, which stand in a
given relation to a certain deed, not visions, which tremble and flicker in the light of other worlds.
The probability that the old king will sleep soundly after his long journey to Inverness is to her
simply a fortunate circumstance; but one can fancy the shoot of horror across Macbeth's face as she
mentions it. She uses familiar and prosaic illustrations, like
Letting 1I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' the adage,
(the cat who wanted fish but did not like to wet her feet); or,
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail; [2]
or
Was the hope drunk?
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?
The Witches are practically nothing to her. She feels no sympathy in Nature with her guilty
purpose, and would never bid the earth not hear her steps, which way they walk. The noises before
the murder, and during it, are heard by her as simple facts, and are referred to their true sources.
The knocking has no mystery for her: it comes from 'the south entry.' She calculates on the
drunkenness of the grooms, compares the different effects of wine on herself and on them, and
listens to their snoring. To her the blood upon her husband's hands suggests only the taunt,
My hands are of your colour, but I shame To wear a heart so white; and the blood to her is merely'
this filthy witness,' words impossible to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other
than sensuous disgust or practical danger. The literalism of her mind appears fully in two
contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in the murder scene:
Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers! The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a paint devil;
and in the banquet scene:
O these flaws and starts,
Impostors to true fear, would well become
A woman's story at a winter's fire,
Authorised by her grandam. Shame itself’
Why do you make such faces? When all's done,
You look but on a stool.
Even in the awful scene where her imagination breaks loose in sleep she uses no such images as
Macbeth's. It is the direct appeal of the facts to sense that has fastened on her memory. The ghastly
realism of 'Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' or 'Here's
the smell of the blood still,' is wholly unlike him. Her most poetical words, 'All the perfumes of
Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,' are equally unlike his words about great Neptune's ocean.
Hers, like some of her other speeches, are the more moving, from their greater simplicity and
because they seem to tell of that self-restraint in suffering which is so totally lacking in him; but
there is in them comparatively little of imagination. If we consider most of the passages to which I
have referred, we shall find that the quality, which moves our admiration, is courage or force of
will.
This want of imagination, though it helps to make Lady Macbeth strong for immediate action, is
fatal to her. If she does not feel beforehand the cruelty of Duncan's murder, this is mainly because
she hardly imagines the act, or at most imagines its outward show, 'the motion of a muscle this way
or that.' Nor does she in the least foresee those inward consequences, which reveal themselves
immediately in her husband and less quickly in herself It is often said that she understands him
well. Had she done so, she never would have urged him on. She knows that he is given to strange
fancies; but, not realising what they spring from, she has no idea either that they may gain such
power as to ruin the scheme, or that, while they mean present weakness, they mean also perception
of the future. At one point in the murder scene the force of his imagination impresses her, and for a
moment she is startled; a light threatens to break on her:
These deeds must not be thought
After these ways: so, it will make us mad,
she says, with a sudden and great seriousness. And when he goes panting on, ‘Methought I heard a
voice cry, "Sleep no more," , ...she breaks in, 'What do you mean?' half-doubting whether this was
not a real voice that he heard. Then, almost directly, she recovers herself, convinced of the vanity
of his fancy. Nor does she understand herself any better than him. She never suspects that these
deeds must be thought after these ways; that her facile realism,
A little water clears us of this deed,
will one day be answered by herself, , Will these hands ne'er be clean ? ' or that the fatal
commonplace, , What's done is done,' will make way for her last despairing sentence, 'What's done
cannot be undone.'
Hence the development of her character perhaps it would be more strictly accurate to say, the
change in her state of mind is both inevitable, and the opposite of the development we traced in
Macbeth. When the murder has been done, the discovery of its hideousness, first reflected in the
faces of her guests, comes to Lady Macbeth with the shock of a sudden disclosure, and at once her
nature begins to sink. The first intimation of the change is given when, in the scene of the
discovery, she faints. [3] When next we see her, Queen of Scotland, the glory of her dream has
faded. She enters, disillusioned, and weary with want of sleep: she has thrown away everything and
gained nothing:
Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
Henceforth she has no initiative: the stem of her being seems to be cut through. Her husband,
physically the stronger, maddened by pangs he had foreseen, but still flaming with life, comes into
the foreground, and she retires. Her will remains, and she does her best to help him; but he rarely
needs her help. Her chief anxiety appears to be that he should not betray his misery. He plans the
murder of Banquo without her knowledge (not in order to spare her, I think, for he never shows
love of this quality, but merely because he does not need her now); and even when she is told
vaguely of his intention she appears but little interested. In the sudden emergency of the banquet
scene she makes a prodigious and magnificent effort; her strength, and with it her ascendancy
returns, and she saves her husband at least from an open disclosure. But after this she takes no part
whatever in the action. We only know from her shuddering words in the sleep-walking scene, 'The
Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?' that she has even learned of her husband's worst
crime; and in all the horrors of his tyranny over Scotland she has, so far as we hear, no part.
Disillusionment and despair prey upon her more and more. That she should seek any relief in
speech, or should ask for sympathy, would seem to her mere weakness, and would be to Macbeth's
defiant fury an irritation. Thinking of the change in him, we imagine the bond between them
slackened, and Lady Macbeth left much alone. She sinks slowly downward. She cannot bear
darkness, and has light by her continually: 'tis her command. At last her nature, not her will, gives
way. The secrets of the past find vent in a disorder of sleep, the beginning perhaps of madness.
What the doctor fears is clear .He reports to her husband no great physical mischief, but bids her
attendant to remove from her all means by which she could harm herself, and to keep eyes on her
constantly. It is in vain. Her death is announced by a cry from her women so sudden and direful
that it would thrill her husband with horror if he were any longer capable of fear. In the last words
of the play Malcolm tells us it is believed in the hostile army that she died by her own hand. And
(not to speak of the indications just referred to) it is in accordance with her character that even in
her weakest hour she should cut short by one determined stroke the agony of her life.
The sinking of Lady Macbeth's nature, and the marked change in her demeanour to her husband,
are most strikingly shown in the conclusion of the banquet scene; and from this point pathos is
mingled with awe. The guests are gone. She is completely exhausted, and answers Macbeth in
listless, submissive words, which seem to come with difficulty. How strange sounds the reply' Did
you send to him, sir?' to his imperious question about Macduff’ And when he goes on, 'waxing
desperate in imagination,' to speak of new deeds of blood, she seems to sicken at the thought, and
there is a deep pathos in that answer which tells at once of her care for him and of the misery she
herself has silently endured,
You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
We begin to think of her now less as the awful instigator of murder than as a woman with much
that is grand in her, and much that is piteous. Strange and almost ludicrous as the statement may
sound [4] she is, up to her light, a perfect wife. She gives her husband the best she has; and the fact
that she never uses to him the terms of affection which, up to this point in the play, he employs to
her, is certainly no indication of want of love. She urges, appeals, reproaches, for a practical end,
but she never recriminates. The harshness of her taunts is free from mere personal feeling, and also
from any deep or more than momentary contempt. She despises what she thinks the weakness,
which stands in the way of her husband's ambition; but she does not despise him. She evidently
admires him and thinks him a great man, for whom the throne is the proper place. Her commanding
attitude in the moments of his hesitation or fear is probably confined to them. If we consider the
peculiar circumstances of the earlier scenes and the banquet scene, and if we examine the language
of the wife and husband at other times, we shall come, I think, to the conclusion that their habitual
relations are better represented by the later scenes than by the earlier, though naturally they are not
truly represented by either.. Her ambition for her husband and herself (there was no distinction to
her mind) proved fatal to him, far more so than the prophecies of the Witches; but even when she
pushed him into murder she believed she was helping him to do what he merely lacked the nerve to
attempt; and her part in the crime was so much less open-eyed than his, that, if the impossible and
undramatic task of estimating degrees of culpability were forced on us, we should surely have to
assign the larger share to Macbeth.
'Lady Macbeth,' says Dr. Johnson, 'is merely detested'; and for a long time critics generally spoke
of her as though she were Malcolm's 'fiend-like queen.' In natural reaction we tend to insist, as I
have been doing, on the other and less obvious side; and in the criticism of the last century there is
even a tendency to sentimentalise the character. But it can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare
meant the predominant impression to be one of awe, grandeur, and horror, and that he never meant
this impression to be lost, however it might be modified, as Lady Macbeth's activity diminishes and
her misery increases. I cannot believe that, when she said of Banquo and Fleance,
But in them nature's copy's not eterne,
she meant only that they would some day die; or that she felt any surprise when Macbeth replied,
There's comfort yet: they are assailable; though I am sure no light came into her eyes when he
added those dreadful words, , Then be thou jocund.' She was listless. She herself would not have
moved a finger against Banquo. But she thought his death, and his son's death, might ease her
husband's mind, and she suggested the murders indifferently and without remorse. The
sleepwalking scene, again, inspires pity, but its main effect is one of awe. There is great horror in
the references to blood, but it cannot be said that there is more than horror; and Campbell was
surely right when, in alluding to Mrs. Jameson's analysis, he insisted that in Lady Macbeth's misery
there is no trace of contrition. [5] Doubtless she would have given the world to undo what she had
done; and the thought of it killed her; but, regarding her from the tragic point of view, we may truly
say she was too great to repent [ 6] .
[note I] So Mrs. Siddons is said to have given the passage.
[note 2] Surely the usual interpretation of ‘W e fail?' as a question of contemptuous astonishment,
is right. 'We fail!' gives practically the same sense, but alters the punctuation of the first two Folios.
In either case, , But,' I think, means 'Only.' On the other hand the proposal to read 'We fail.' With a
full stop, as expressive of sublime acceptance of the possibility, seems to me, however attractive at
first sight, quite out of harmony with Lady Macbeth's mood throughout these scenes.
[note 3] See Note DD.
[note 4] it is not new.
[note 5] The words about Lady Macduff are of course significant of natural human feeling, and
may have been introduced expressly to mark it, but they do not, I think, show any fundamental
change in Lady Macbeth, for at no time would she have suggested or approved a purposeless
atrocity. It is perhaps characteristic that this human feeling should show itself most clearly in
reference to an act for which she was not directly responsible, and in regard to which therefore she
does not feel the instinct of self-assertion.
[ note 6] The tendency to sentimentalise Lady Macbeth is partly due to Mrs. Siddons's fancy that
she was a small, fair, blue-eyed woman, 'perhaps even fragile.' Dr. Bucknill, who was unacquainted
with this fancy, independently determined that she was 'beautiful and delicate,' 'unoppressed by
weight of flesh,' 'probably small,' but 'a tawny or brown blonde,' with grey eyes: and Brandes
affirms that she was lean, slight, and hard. They know much more than Shakespeare, who tells us
absolutely nothing on these subjects. That Lady Macbeth, after taking part in a murder, was so
exhausted as to faint, will hardly demonstrate her fragility. That she must have been blue-eyed, fair,
or red-haired, because she was a Celt, is a bold inference, and it is an idle dream that Shakespeare
had any idea of making her or her husband characteristically Celtic. The only evidence ever offered
to prove that she was small is the sentence, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand'; and Goliath might have called his hand 'little' in contrast with all the perfumes of Arabia.
One might as well propose to prove that Othello was a small man by quoting,
I have seen the day,
That, with this little arm and this good sword,
I have made my way through more impediments
Than twenty times your stop.
The reader is at liberty to imagine Lady Macbeth's person in the way that pleases him best, or to
leave it, as Shakespeare very likely did, unimagined.
Perhaps it may be well to add that there is not the faintest trace in the play of the idea occasionally
met with, and to some extent embodied in Madame Bernhardt's impersonation of Lady Macbeth
that her hold upon her husband lay in seductive attractions deliberately exercised. Shakespeare was
not unskilled or squeamish in indicating such ideas.
back to index ^
7. THE CHARACTER OF BANQUO
The main interest of the character of Banquo arises from the changes that take place in him, and
from the influence of the Witches upon him. And it is curious that Shakespeare's intention here is
so frequently missed. Banquo being at first strongly contrasted with Macbeth, as an innocent man
with a guilty, it seems to be supposed that this contrast must be continued to his death; while, in
reality, though it is never removed, it is gradually diminished. Banquo in fact may be described
much more truly than Macbeth as the victim of the Witches. If we follow his story this will be
evident.
He bore apart only less distinguished than Macbeth's in the battles against Sweno and
Macdonwald. He and Macbeth are called ' our captains,' and when they meet the Witches they are
traversing the 'blasted heath' [ I] alone together. Banquo accosts the strange shapes without the
slightest fear. They lay their fingers on their lips, as if to signify that they will not, or must not,
speak to him. To Macbeth's brief appeal, 'speak, if you can: what are you? ' they at once reply, not
by saying what they are, but by hailing him Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King
hereafter. Banquo is greatly surprised that his partner should start as if in fear, and observes that he
is at once 'rapt'; and he bids the Witches, if they know the future, to prophesy to him, who neither
begs their favour nor fears their hate. Macbeth, looking back at a later time, remembers Banquo's
daring, and how
he chid the sisters,
When first they put the name of king upon me,
And bade them speak to himChid' is an exaggeration; but Banquo is evidently a bold man, probably an ambitious one, and
certainly has no lurking guilt in his ambition. On hearing the predictions concerning himself and
his descendants he makes no answer, and when the Witches are about to vanish he shows none of
Macbeth's feverish anxiety to know more. On their vanishing he is simply amazed, wonder if they
were anything but hallucinations, makes no reference to the predictions till Macbeth mentions
them, and then answers lightly.
When Ross and Angus, entering, announce to Macbeth that he has been made Thane of Cawdor,
Banquo exclaims, aside, to himself or Macbeth, 'What! can the devil speak true ? ' He now believes
that the Witches were real beings and the instruments of darkness. ' When Macbeth, turning to him,
whispers,
Do you not hope your children shall be kings,
When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me
Promised no less to them?
he draws with the boldness of innocence the inference which is really occupying Macbeth, and
answers,
That, trusted home,
Might yet enkindle you unto the crown
Besides the thane of Cawdor.
Here he still speaks, I think, in a free, off-hand, even jesting,' [2] manner ('enkindle' meaning
merely 'excite you to hope for'). But then, possibly from noticing something in Macbeth's face, he
becomes graver, and goes on, with a significant' but,'
But 'tis strange:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence.
He afterwards observes for the second time that his partner is rapt'; but he explains his abstraction
naturally and sincerely by referring to the surprise of his new honours; and at the close of the scene,
when Macbeth proposes that they shall discuss the predictions together at some later time, he
answers in the cheerful, rather bluff manner, which he has used almost throughout, 'Very gladly.'
Nor was there any reason why Macbeth's rejoinder, 'Till then, enough,' should excite misgivings in
him, though it implied a request for silence, and though the whole behaviour of his partner during
the scene must have looked very suspicious to him when the prediction of the crown was made
good through the murder of Duncan.
In the next scene Macbeth and Banquo join the King, who welcomes them both with the kindest
expressions of gratitude and with promises of favours to come. Macbeth has indeed already
received a noble reward. Banquo, who is said by the King to have 'no less deserved,' receives as yet
mere thanks. His brief and frank acknowledgement is contrasted with Macbeth's laboured rhetoric;
and, as Macbeth goes out, Banquo turns with hearty praises of him to the King.
And when next we see him, approaching Macbeth's castle in company with Duncan, there is still no
sign of change. Indeed he gains on us. It is he who speaks the beautiful lines,
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry , that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate;
-lines which tell of that freedom of heart, and that sympathetic sense of peace and beauty, which
the Macbeth of the tragedy could never feel.
But now Banquo's sky begins to darken. At the opening of the Second Act we see him with Fleance
crossing the court of the castle on his way to bed. The blackness of the moonless, starless night
seems to oppress him. And he is oppressed by something else.
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers,
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose!
On Macbeth's entrance we know what Banquo means: he says to Macbeth and it is the first time he
refers to the subject unprovoked,
I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters.
His will is still untouched: he would repel the 'cursed thoughts; and they are mere thoughts; not
intentions. But still they are' thoughts,' something more, probably, than mere recollections; and they
bring with them an undefined sense of guilt. The poison has begun to work.
The passage that follows Banquo’s words to Macbeth is difficult to interpret:
I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters:
To you they have show'd some truth.
Macb.
I think not of them:
Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve,
We would spend it in some words upon that business,
If you would grant the time.
Ban.
At your kind'st leisure.
Macb.
If you shall cleave to my consent, when ‘tis, It shall make honour for you.
Ban.
So I lose none
In seeking to augment it, but still keep
My bosom franchised and allegiance clear,
I shall be counsell'd.
Macb.
Good repose the while!
Ban.
Thanks, sir: the like to you!
Macbeth's first idea is, apparently, simply to free himself from any suspicion which the discovery
of the murder might suggest, by showing himself, just before it, quite indifferent to the predictions,
and merely looking forward to a conversation about them at some future time. But why does he go
on, , if you shall cleave,' etc. ? Perhaps he foresees that, on the discovery, Banquo cannot fail to
suspect him, and thinks it safest to prepare the way at once for an understanding with him (in the
original story he makes Banquo his accomplice before the murder). Banquo’s answer shows three
things, -that he fears a treasonable proposal, that he has no idea of accepting it, and that he has no
fear of Macbeth to restrain him from showing what is in his mind.
Duncan is murdered. In the scene of discovery Banquo of course appears, and his behaviour is
significant. When he enters, and Macduff cries out to him,
O Banquo, Banquo,
Our royal master's murdered,
and Lady Macbeth, who has entered a moment before, exclaims,
Woe, alas!
What, in our house?
his answer,
Too cruel anywhere,
shows, as I have pointed out, repulsion, and we may be pretty sure that he suspects the truth
at once. After a few words to Macbeth he remains absolutely silent while the scene is continued for
nearly forty lines. He is watching Macduff and listening as he tells how he pelts the chamberlains
to death in a frenzy of loyal rage. At last Banquo appears to have made up his mind. On Lady
Macbeth's fainting he proposes that they shall all retire, and that they shall afterwards meet,
And question this most bloody piece of work
To know it further. Fears and scruples [3] shake us:
In the great hand of God I stand, and thence
Against the undivulged pretence [ 4] I fight
Of treasonous malice.
His solemn language here reminds us of his grave words about 'the instruments of darkness, , and
of his later prayer to the 'merciful powers.' He is profoundly shocked, full of indignation, and
determined to play the part of a brave and honest man.
But he plays no such part. When next we see him, on the last day of his life, we find that he has
yielded to evil. The Witches and his own ambition have conquered him. He alone of the lords knew
of the prophecies, but he has said nothing of them. He has acquiesced in Macbeth's accession, and
in the official theory that Duncan's sons had suborned the chamberlains to murder him. Doubtless,
unlike Macduff, he was present at Scone to see the new king invested. He has, not formally but in
effect, 'cloven to I Macbeth's ' consent '; he is knit to him by 'a most indissoluble tie'; his advice in
council has been' most grave and prosperous'; he is to be the 'chief guest' at that night's supper. And
his soliloquy tells us why:
Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all,
As the weird women promised, and, I fear,
Thou play'dst most foully for't: yet it was said It should not stand in thy posterity,
But that myself should be the root and father
Of many kings. If there come truth from them
As upon thee, Macbeth, their speeches shine
Why, by the verities on thee made good,
May they not be my oracles as well,
And set me up in hope? But hush! no more.
This 'hush! no more' is not the dismissal of’ cursed thoughts': it only means that he hears the
trumpets announcing the entrance of the King and Queen.
His punishment comes swiftly, much more swiftly than Macbeth's, and saves him from any further
fall. He is a very fearless man, and still so far honourable that he has no thought of acting to bring
about the fulfilment of the prophecy, which has beguiled him. And therefore he has no fear of
Macbeth. But he little understands him. To Macbeth's tormented mind Banquo's conduct appears
highly suspicious. Why has this bold and circumspect [5] man kept his secret and become his chief
adviser? In order to make good his part of the predictions after Macbeth's own precedent. Banquo
he is sure, will suddenly and secretly attack. It is not the far -off accession of Banquo's descendants
that he fears; it is (so he tells himself) swift murder; not that the' barren sceptre' will some day
droop from his dying hand, but that it will be 'wrenched' away now (III. i. 62). [6] So he kills
Banquo. But the Banquo he kills is not the innocent soldier who met the Witches and daffed their
prophecies aside, nor the man who prayed to be delivered from the temptation of his dreams.
Macbeth leaves on most readers a profound impression of the misery of a guilty conscience and the
retribution of crime. And the strength of this impression is one of the reasons why the tragedy is
admired by readers who shrink from Othello and are made unhappy by Lear. But what Shakespeare
perhaps felt even more deeply, when he wrote these plays, was the incalculability of evil, that in
meddling with it human beings do they know not what. The soul, he seems to feel, is a thing of
such inconceivable depth, complexity, and delicacy, that when you introduce into it, or suffer to
develop in it, any change, and particularly the change called evil, you can form only the vaguest
idea of the reaction you will provoke. All you can be sure of is that it will not be what you
expected, and that you cannot possibly escape it. Banquo's story, if truly apprehended, produces
this impression quite as strongly as the more terrific stories of the chief characters, and perhaps
even more clearly, inasmuch as he is nearer to average human nature, has obviously at first a quiet
conscience, and uses with evident sincerity the language of religion.
[note 1] That it is Macbeth who feels the harmony between the desolation of the heath and the
figures who appear on it is a characteristic touch.
[note 2] So, in Holinshed, 'Banquho jested with him and sayde, now Makbeth thou haste obtayned
those things which the twoo former sisters prophesied, there remayneth onely for thee to purchase
that which the third sayd should come to passe.'
[ note 3] = doubts.
[ note 4] = design[ note 5] tis much he dares,
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety.
[ note 6] So when he hears that Fleance has escaped he is not much troubled (ill. iv. 29):
the worm that's fled
Hath nature that in time will venom breed,
No teeth for the present.
I have repeated above what I have said before, because the meaning of Macbeth's soliloquy is
frequently misconceived.
back to index ^
8. "CHARACTERLESS" CHARACTERS
Apart from his story Banquo's character is not very interesting, nor is it, I think, perfectly
individual. And this holds good of the rest of the minor characters. They are sketched lightly, and
are seldom developed further than the strict purposes of the action required. From this point of
view they are inferior to several of the less important figures in each of the other three tragedies.
The scenes in which Lady Macduff and her child appear, and the passage where their slaughter is
reported to Macduff, have much dramatic value, but in neither case is the effect due to any great
extent to the special characters of the persons concerned. Neither they, nor Duncan, nor Malcolm,
nor even Banquo himself, have been imagined intensely, and therefore they do not produce that
sense of unique personality which Shakespeare could convey in a much smaller number of lines
than he gives to most of them.[l] And this is of course even more the case with persons like Ross,
Angus, and Lennox, though each of these has distinguishable features. I doubt if any other great
play of Shakespeare's contains so many speeches, which a student of the play, if they were quoted
to him, would be puzzled to assign to the speakers. Let the reader turn, for instance, to the second
scene of the Fifth Act, and ask himself why the names of the persons should not be interchanged in
all the ways mathematically possible. Can he find, again, any signs of character by which to
distinguish the speeches of Ross and Angus in Act I. scenes ii and iii, or to determine that Malcolm
must have spoken I. iv. 2-11 ? Most of this writing, we may almost say, is simply Shakespeare's
writing, not that of Shakespeare become another person. And can anything like the same proportion
of such writing be found in Hamlet, Othello, or King Lear?
Is it possible to guess the reason of this characteristic of Macbeth? I cannot believe it is due to the
presence of a second hand. The writing, mangled by the printer and perhaps by 'The players,' seems
to be sometimes obviously Shakespeare's, sometimes sufficiently Shakespearean to repel any attack
not based on external evidence. It may be, as the shortness of the play has suggested to some, that
Shakespeare was hurried, and, throwing all his weight on the principal characters did not exert
himself in dealing with the rest. But there is another possibility, which may be worth considering.
Macbeth is distinguished by its simplicity, by grandeur in simplicity, no doubt, but still by
simplicity. 'The two great figures indeed can hardly be called simple, except in comparison with
such characters as Hamlet and Iago; but in almost every other respect the tragedy has this quality.
Its plot is quite plain. It has very little intermixture of humour. It has little pathos except of the
sternest kind. The style, for Shakespeare, has not much variety, being generally kept at a higher
pitch than in the other three tragedies; and there is much less than usual of the interchange of verse
and prose. [2] All this makes for simplicity of effect. And, this being so, is it not possible that
Shakespeare instinctively felt, or consciously feared, that to give much individuality or attraction to
the subordinate figures would diminish this effect, and so, like a good artist, sacrificed a part to the
whole? And was he wrong? He has certainly avoided the overloading which distresses us in King
Lear, and has produced a tragedy utterly unlike it, not much less great as a dramatic poem, and as a
drama superior.
I would add, though without much confidence, another suggestion. The simplicity of Macbeth is
one of the reasons why many readers feel that, in spite of its being intensely 'romantic,' it is less
unlike a classical tragedy than Hamlet or Othello or King Lear. And it is possible that this effect is,
in a sense, the result of design. I do not mean that Shakespeare intended to imitate a classical
tragedy; I mean only that he may have seen in the bloody story of Macbeth a subject suitable for
treatment in a manner somewhat nearer to that of Seneca, or of the English Senecan plays familiar
to him in his youth, than was the manner of his own mature tragedies. The Witches doubtless are
'romantic,' but so is the witch-craft in Seneca's Medea and Hercules Oetaeus; indeed it is difficult to
read the account of Medea's preparations (670-739) without being reminded of the incantations in
Macbeth. Banquo's Ghost again is 'romantic,' but so are Seneca's ghosts. For the swelling of the
style in some of the great passages however immeasurably superior these may be to anything in
Seneca and certainly for the turgid bombast which occasionally appears in Macbeth, and which
seems to have horrified Jonson, Shakespeare might easily have found a model in Seneca. Did he
not think that this was the high Roman manner? Does not the Sergeant's speech, as Coleridge
observed, recall the style of the 'passionate speech' of the Player in Hamlet, a speech, be it
observed, on a Roman subject? [3] And is it entirely an accident that parallels between Seneca and
Shakespeare seem to be more frequent in Macbeth than in any other of his undoubtedly genuine
works except perhaps Richard ill., a tragedy unquestionably influenced either by Seneca or by
English Senecan plays? [4] If there is anything in these suggestions, and if we suppose that
Shakespeare meant to give to his playa certain classical tinge, he might naturally carry out this idea
in respect to the characters, as well as in other respects, by concentrating almost the whole interest
on the important figures and leaving the others comparatively shadowy.
[ note 1] Virgilia in Coriolanus is a famous example. She speaks about thirty-five lines.
[ note 2] The percentage of prose is, roughly, in Hamlet 302/8, in Othello 16 1/3, in King Lear 27
1/3, in Macbeth 8 1/2.
[note 3] cf Note F. There are also in Macbeth several shorter passages which recall the Player's
speech. Cf. 'Fortune. ..showed like a rebel's whore' (1 ii. 14) with' Out! out! thou strumpet Fortune !
[note 4] The form 'eterne' occurs in Shakespeare only in Macbeth, ill. ii. 38, and in the, proof
eterne' of the Player's speech. Cf ' So, as a painted tyrant, pyrrhus stood,' with Macbeth, V. viii. 26
'the rugged pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,' with' the rugged Russian bear ...or the
Hyrcan tiger' (Macbeth. ill. iv. 100); 'like a neutral to his will and matter' with Macbeth, I. v. 47.
The words 'Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' in the SeIjeant's speech, recall the
words 'Then from the navel to the throat at once He ript old Priam,' in Dido Queen of Carthage,
where these words follow those others, about Priam falling with the mere wind of Pyrrhus' sword,
which seem to have suggested' the whiff and wind of his fell sword' in the Player's speech.
[note I, p 390] , See Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy. The most famous
of these parallels is that between 'Will all great Neptune's Ocean,' etc., and the following passages:
Quis eluet me Tanais? aut quae barbaris
Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari?
Non ipse toto magnus Gceano pater
Tantum expiarit sceleris. (Hipp. 715)
Quis Tanais, aut quis Nilus, aut quis Persica
Violentus unda Tigris, aut Rhenus ferox,
Tagusve Ibera turbidus gaza fluens
Abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare,
Et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
Haerebit altum facinus. (Herc. Furens, 1323.)
(The reader will remember Othello's 'Pontic sea' with its 'violent pace.') Medea's incantation in
avid's Metamorphoses, vii. 197 ff., which certainly suggested Prospero's speech, Tempest, v. i. 33
if., should be compared with Seneca, Herc. Get., 452 ff., , Artibus magicis,' etc. It is of course
highly probable that Shakespeare read some Seneca at school. I may add that in the Hippolytus,
beside the passage quoted above, there are others, which might have furnished him with
suggestions. Cf for instance Hipp., 30 if, with the lines about the Spartan hounds in Mids. Night's
Dream IV. i. 117 ff., and Hippolytus' speech, begin 483, with the Duke's speech in as you Like It,
ll. i.
back to index ^
9. MACDUFF, LADY MACDUFF AND THE PORTER
Macbeth being more simple than the other tragedies, and broader and more massive in effect, three
passages in it are of great importance as securing variety in tone, and also as affording relief from
the feelings excited by the Witch-scenes and the principal characters. They are the passage where
the Porter appears, the conversation between Lady Macduff and her little boy and the passage
where Macduff receives the news of the slaughter of his wife and babes. Yet the first of these, we
are told even by Coleridge, is unworthy of Shakespeare and is not his; and the second, with the rest
of the scene which contains it, appears to be usually omitted in stage representations of Macbeth.
I question if either this scene or the exhibition of Macduffs grief is required to heighten our
abhorrence of Macbeth's cruelty. They have a technical value in helping to give the last stage of the
action the form of a conflict between Macbeth and Macduff. But their chief function is of another
kind. . It is to touch the heart with a sense of beauty and pathos, to open the springs of love and of
tears. Shakespeare is loved for the sweetness of his humanity, and because he makes this kind of
appeal with such irresistible persuasion; and the reason why Macbeth, though admired as much as
any work of his, is scarcely loved, is that the characters who predominate cannot make this kind of
appeal, and at no point are able to inspire unmingled sympathy. The two passages in question
supply this want in such measure as Shakespeare thought advisable in Macbeth, and the play would
suffer greatly from their excision. The second, on the stage, is extremely moving, and Macbeth's
reception of the news of his wife’s. Death may be intended to recall it by way of contrast. The first
brings a relief even greater, because here the element of beauty is more marked, and because
humour is mingled with pathos. In both we escape from the oppression of huge sins and sufferings
into the presence of the wholesome affections of unambitious hearts; and, though both scenes are
painful and one dreadful, our sympathies can flow unchecked. [ I]
Lady Macduff is a simple wife and mother, who has no thought for anything beyond her home. Her
love for her children shows her at once that her husband's flight exposes them to terrible danger.
She is in an agony of fear for them, and full of indignation against him. It does not even occur to
her that he has acted from public spirit, or that there is such a thing.
What had he done to make him fly the land?
He must have been mad to do it. He fled for fear .He does not love his wife and children. He is a
traitor. The poor soul is almost beside herself and with too good reason. But when the murderer
bursts in with the question' Where is your husband? ' She becomes in a moment the wife, and the
great noble's wife:
I hope, in no place so unsanctified
Where such as thou may'st find him.
What did Shakespeare mean us to think of Macduffs flight, for which Macduff has been much
blamed by others beside his wife? Certainly not that fear for himself, or want of love for his family,
had anything to do with it. His love for his country, so strongly marked in the scene with Malcolm,
is evidently his one motive.
He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
The fits o' the season,
says Ross. That his flight was' noble' is beyond doubt. That it was not wise or judicious in the
interest of his family is no less clear. But that does not show that it was wrong; and, even if it were,
to represent its consequences as a judgement on him for his want of due consideration is equally
monstrous and ludicrous. [2] The further question whether he did fail in due consideration, or
whether for his country's sake he deliberately risked a danger which he fully realised, would in
Shakespeare's theatre have been answered at once by Macduffs expression and demeanour on
hearing Malcolm's words,
Why in that rawness left you wife and child,
Those precious motives, those strong knots of love,
Without leave-taking?
It cannot be decided with certainty from the mere text; but, without going into the considerations
on each side, I may express the opinion that Macduff knew well what he was doing, and that he
fled without leave-taking for fear his purpose should give way, Perhaps he said to himself, with
Coriolanus,
Not of a woman's tenderness to be,
Requires nor child nor woman's face to see.
Little Macduff suggests a few words on Shakespeare's boys (there are scarcely any little girls). It is
somewhat curious that nearly all of them appear in tragic or semi-tragic dramas. I remember but
two exceptions: little William Page, who said his Hic, haec, hoc to Sir Hugh Evans; and the page
before whom Falstaff walked like a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one; and it is to be
feared that even this page, if he is the Boy of Henry V., came to an ill end, being killed with the
luggage.
So wise so young, they say, do ne'er live long,
as Richard observed of the little Prince of Wales. Of too many of these children (some of the 'boys,'
eg. those in Cymbeline, are lads, not children) the saying comes true. They are pathetic figures, the
more so because they so often appear in company with their unhappy mothers, and can never be
thought of apart from them. Perhaps Arthur is even the first creation in which Shakespeare's power
of pathos showed itself mature; [3] and the last of his children, Mamillius, assuredly proves that it
never decayed. They are almost all of them noble figures, too, affectionate, frank, brave, highspirited, 'of an open and free nature' like Shakespeare's best men. And almost all of them, again, are
amusing and charming as well as pathetic; comical in their mingled acuteness and naivete,
charming in their confidence in themselves and the world, and in the seriousness with which they
receive the jocosity of their elders, who commonly address them as strong men, great warriors, or
profound politicians.
Little Macduff exemplifies most of these remarks. There is nothing in the scene of a transcendent
kind, like the passage about Mamillius' never-finished ' Winter's Tale' of the man who dwelt by a
churchyard, or the passage about his death, or that about little Marcius and the butterfly, or the
audacity which introduces him, at the supreme moment of the tragedy, outdoing the appeals of
Volumnia and Virgilia by the statement,
'A shall not tread on me:
I'll run away till I'm bigger, but then I'll fight.
Still one does not easily forget little Macduffs delightful and well-justified confidence in his ability
to defeat his mother in argument; or the deep impression she made on him when she spoke of his
father as a 'traitor'; or his immediate response when he heard the murderer call his father by the
same name,
Thou liest, thou shag-haired villain.
Nor am I sure that, if the son of Coriolanus had been murdered, his last words to his mother would
have been, 'Run away, I pray you.'
I may add two remarks. The presence of this child is one of the things in which Macbeth reminds
us of Richard III. And he is perhaps the only person in the tragedy who provokes a smile. I say
'perhaps,' for though the anxiety of the Doctor to escape from the company of his patient's husband
makes one smile, I am not sure that it was meant to.
The Porter does not make me smile: the moment is too terrific. He is grotesque; no doubt the
contrast he affords is humorous as well as ghastly; I dare say the groundlings roared with laughter
at his coarsest remarks. But they are not comic enough to allow one to forget for a moment what
has preceded and what must follow. And I am far from complaining of this. I believe that it is what
Shakespeare intended, and that he despised the groundlings if they laughed. Of course he could
have written without the least difficulty speeches five times as humorous; but he knew better. The
Gravediggers make us laugh: the old Countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra makes us smile
at least. But the Gravedigger scene does not come at a moment of extreme tension; and it is long.
Our distress for Ophelia is not so absorbing that we refuse to be interested in the man who digs her
grave, or even continue throughout the long conversation to remember always with pain that the
grave is hers. It is fitting, therefore, that he should be made decidedly humorous. The passage in
Antony and Cleopatra is much nearer to the passage in Macbeth, and seems to have been forgotten
by those who say that there is nothing in Shakespeare resembling that passage. [4] The old
Countryman comes at a moment of tragic exaltation, and the dialogue is appropriately brief. But
the moment, though tragic, is emphatically one of exaltation. We have not been feeling horror, nor
are we feeling a dreadful suspense. We are going to see Cleopatra die, but she is to die gloriously
and to triumph over Octavius. And therefore our amusement at the old Countryman and the
contrast he affords to these high passions is untroubled, and it was right to make him really comic.
But the Porter's case is quite different. We cannot forget how the knocking that makes him grumble
sounded to Macbeth, or that within a few minutes of his opening the gate Duncan will be
discovered in his blood; nor can we help feeling that in pretending to be porter of hell-gate he is
terribly near the truth. To give him language so humorous that it would ask us almost to lose the
sense of these things would have been a fatal mistake, the kind of mistake that means want of
dramatic imagination. And that was not the sort of error into which Shakespeare fell.
To doubt the genuineness of the passage, then, on the ground that it is not humorous enough for
Shakespeare, seems to me to show this want. It is to judge the passage as though it were a separate
composition, instead of conceiving it in the fullness of its relations to its surroundings in a stageplay. Taken by itself, I admit, it would bear no indubitable mark of Shakespeare's authorship, not
even in the phrase I the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,' which Coleridge thought
Shakespeare might have added to an interpolation of' the players.' And if there were reason (as in
my judgement there is not) to suppose that Shakespeare thus permitted an interpolation, or that he
collaborated with another author, I could believe that he left 'the players' or his collaborator to write
the words of the passage. But that anyone except the author of the scene of Duncan's murder
conceived the passage, is incredible. [5]
[note 1] Cf Coleridge's note on the Lady Macduff scene.
[note 2] It is nothing to the purpose that Macduff himself says,
Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
F ell slaughter on their souls,
There is no reason to suppose that the sin and demerit he speaks of is that of leaving his home. And
even if it were, it is Macduff that speaks, not Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare speaks in
the preceding sentence,
Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part?
And yet Brandes (ii. 104) hears in these words' the voice of revolt. ..that sounds later through the
despairing philosophy of King Lear.' It sounds a good deal earlier too; eg in Tit. And., IV. i. 81, and
2 Henry VI. n. i. 154. The idea is a commonplace of Elizabethan tragedy.
[note 3] And the idea that it was the death of his son Hamlet, aged eleven that, brought this power
to maturity is one of the mane plausible attempts to find in his dramas a reflection of his private
history. It implies however as late a date as 1596 for King John.
[note 4] Even if this were true, the retort is obvious that neither is they’re anything resembling the
murder-scene in Macbeth.
[ note 5] I have confined myself to the single aspect or this question on which I had what seemed
something new to say. Professor Hales's defence of the passage on fuller grounds, in the admirable
paper reprinted in his Notes and Essays on Shakespeare, seems to me quite conclusive. I may add
two notes.
( 1) The references in the Porter's speeches to 'equivocation, , which have naturally, and probably
rightly, been taken as allusions to the Jesuit Garnet's appeal to the doctrine of equivocation in
defence of his perjury when on trial for participation in the Gunpowder Plot, do not stand alone in
Macbeth. The later prophecies of the Witches Macbeth calls 'the equivocation of the fiend That lies
like truth' (v. v. 43); and the Porter's remarks about the equivocator who' could swear in both the
scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate
to heaven,' may be compared with the following dialogue (IV. ii. 45):
Son.
Lady Macduff.
Son.
Lady Macduff.
What is a traitor?
Why, one that swears, and lies.
And be all traitors that do so?
Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged.
Garnet, as a matter of fact" was hanged in May" 1606; and it is to be feared that the audience
applauded this passage.
(2) The Porter's soliloquy on the different applicants for admittance has, in idea and manner, a
marked resemblance to Pompey's soliloquy on the inhabitants of the prison, in Measure for
Measure, IV. iii, x ff. ; and the dialogue between him and Abhorson on the' mystery , of hanging
(IV, ii. 22 If. ) is of just the same kind as the Porter's dialogue with Macduff about drink.
back to index ^
10. PASSAGES OF PROSE
The speeches of the Porter, a low comic character, are in prose. So is the letter of Macbeth to his
wife. In both these cases Shakespeare follows his general rule or custom. The only other prose
speeches occur in the sleep-walking scene, and here the use of prose may seem strange. For in great
tragic scenes we expect the more poetic medium of expression, and this is one of the most famous
of such scenes. Besides, unless I mistake, Lady Macbeth is the only one of. Shakespeare's great
tragic characters who on a last appearance is denied the dignity of verse.
Yet in this scene also he adheres to his custom. Somnambulism is an abnormal condition, and it is
his general rule to assian prose to persons whose state of mind is abnormal. Thus, to illustrate from
these four plays, Hamlet when playing the madman speaks prose, but in soliloquy, in talking with
Horatio, and in pleading with his mother, he speaks verse. [ I] Ophelia in her madness either sings
snatches of songs or speaks prose. Almost all
Lear's speeches, after he has become definitely insane, are in prose: where he wakes from sleep
recovered, the verse returns. The prose enters with that speech which closes with his trying to tear
off his clothes; but he speaks in verse some of it very irregular in the Timon-like speeches where
his intellect suddenly in his madness seems to regain the force of his best days (IV. vi.) Othello, in
IV. i., speaks in verse till the moment when lago tells him that Cassio has confessed. There follow
ten lines of prose exclamations and mutterings of bewildered horror and he falls to the ground
unconscious.
The idea underlying this custom of Shakespeare's evidently is that the regular rhythm of verse
would be inappropriate where the mind is supposed to have lost its balance and to be at the mercy
of chance impressions corning from without (as sometimes with Lear), or of ideas emerging from
its unconscious depths and pursuing one another across its passive surface. The somnambulism of
Lady Macbeth is such a condition. There is no rational connection in the sequence of images and
ideas The sight of blood on her hand, the sound of the clock striking the hour for Duncan's murder,
the hesitation of her husband before that hour came, the vision of the old man in his blood, the idea
of the murdered wife of Macduff, the sight of the hand again, Macbeth's ' flaws and starts' at the
sight of Banquo's ghost, the smell on her hand, the washing of hands after Duncan's murder again,
her husband's fear of the buried Banquo, the sound of the knocking at the gate these possess her,
one after another, in this chance order. It is not much less accidental than the order of Ophelia's
ideas; the great difference is that with Ophelia total insanity has effaced or greatly weakened the
emotional force of the ideas, whereas to Lady Macbeth each new image or perception comes laden
with anguish. There is, again, scarcely a sign of the exaltation of disordered imagination; we are
conscious rather of an intense suffering which forces its
way into light against resistance, and speaks a language for the most part strikingly bare in its
diction and simple in its construction. This language stands in strong contrast with that of Macbeth
in the surrounding scenes, full of a feverish and almost furious excitement, and seems to express a
far more desolating misery.
The effect is extraordinarily impressive. The soaring pride and power of Lady Macbeth's first
speeches return on our memory, and the change is felt with a breathless awe. Any attempt, even by
Shakespeare, to draw out the moral enfolded in this awe, would but weaken it. F or the moment,
too, all the language of poetry -even of Macbeth's poetry seems to be touched, with unreality, and
these brief toneless sentences seem the only voice of truth. [2]
[ note 1] In the last Act, however he speaks in verse even in the quarrel with Laertes at
Ophelia's grave. It would be plausible to explain this either from his imitating what he thinks the
rant of Laertes, or by supposing that his' towering passion' made him forget to act the madman. But
in the final scene also he speaks in verse in the presence of all. This again might be accounted for
by saying that he is supposed to be in a lucid interval, as indeed his own language at 239 ff implies.
But the probability is that Shakespeare's real reason for breaking his rule here was simply that he
did not choose to deprive Hamlet of verse on his last appearance. 1 wonder the disuse of prose in
these two scenes has not been observed, and used as an argument, by those who think that Hamlet,
with the commission in his pocket, is now resolute.
[ note 2] The verse-speech of the Doctor, which closes this scene, lowers the tension towards that
of the next scene. His introductory conversation with the gentlewoman is written in prose
(sometimes very near verse) partly, perhaps, from its familiar character, but chiefly because Lady
Macbeth is to speak in prose.
back to index ^
11. SUSPECTED INTERPOLATIONS IN MACBETH
I have assumed in the text that almost the whole of Macbeth is genuine; and, to avoid the repetition
of arguments to be found in other books, [ I] I shall leave this opinion unsupported. But among the
passages that have been questioned or rejected there are two, which seem to me open to serious
doubt. They are those in which Hectate appears: viz. the whole of III. v. and IV. i. 39- 43.
These passages have been suspected (I) because they contain stage-directions for two songs which
have been found in Middleton's Witch; (2) because they can be excised without leaving the least
trace of their excision; and (3) because they contain lines incongruous with the spirit and
atmosphere of the rest the Witch-scenes: e.g. III. v. 10 f.:
all you have done
Hath been but for a wayward son,
Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do,
Loves for his own ends not for you;
and IV. i. 41,2:
And now about the cauldron sing,
Like elves and fairies in a ring.
The idea of sexual relation in the first passage, and the trivial daintiness of the second (with which
cf. III v. 34,
Hark! I am call'd; my little spirit, see,
Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me)
suit Middleton's Witches quite well, but Shakespeare's not at all; and it is difficult to believe that, if
Shakespeare had meant to introduce a personage supreme over the Witches, he would have made
her so unimpressive as this Hectate. (It may be added that the original stage-direction at IV. i. 39,
'Enter Hectate and the other three Witches,' is suspicious.)
I doubt if the second and third of these arguments, taken alone, would justify a very serious
suspicion of interpolation; but the fact, mentioned under ( I ), that the play has here been meddled
with, trebles their weight. And it gives some weight to the further fact that these passages resemble
one another, and differ from the bulk of the other Witch passages, in being iambic in rhythm. (It
must, however, be remembered that, supposing Shakespeare did mean to introduce Hectate, he
might naturally use a special rhythm for the parts where she appeared. )
The same rhythm appears in a third passage, which has been doubted: IV. i. 125-132. But this is not
quite on a level with the other two; for (I), though it is possible to suppose the Witches, as well as
the Apparitions, to vanish at 124, and Macbeth's speech to run straight on to 133, the cut is not so
clean as in the other cases; (2) it is not at all clear that Hectate (the most suspicious element) is
supposed to be present. The original stage-direction at 133 is merely 'The Witches Dance, and
vanish '; and even if Hectate had been present before, she might have vanished at 43, as Dyce
makes her do.
[note 1] E.g. Mr. Chamber's excellent little edition in the Warwick series.
back to index ^
12. HAS MACBETH BEEN ABRIDGED?
Macbeth is a very short play, the shortest of all Shakespeare's except the Comedy of Errors .
It contains only 1993 lines, while King Lear contains 3298, Othello 3324, and Hamlet 3294.
The next shortest of the tragedies is Julius Caesar , which has 2440 lines. (The figures are Mr .
Fleay's. I may remark that for our present purpose we want the number of the lines in the first
Folio, not those in modern composite texts.)
Is there any reason to think that the play has been shortened? I will briefly consider this question,
so far as it can be considered apart from the wider one whether Shakespeare's play was re-handled
by Middleton or some one else.
That the play, as we have it, is slightly shorter than the play Shakespeare wrote seems not
improbable. (1) We have no Quarto of Macbeth; and generally, where we have a Quarto or Quartos
of a play, we find them longer than the Folio text. (2) There are perhaps a few signs of omission in
our text (over and above the plentiful signs of corruption). I will give one example (1. iv. 33-43).
Macbeth and Banquo, returning from their victories, enter the presence of Duncan (14), who
receives them with compliments and thanks, which they acknowledge. He then speaks as follows:
My plenteous joys,
Wanton in fullness, seek to hide themselves
In drops of sorrow. Sons, kinsmen, thanes,
And you whose places are the nearest, know,
We will establish our estate upon.
Our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter
The Prince of Cumberland; which honour must
Not unaccompanied invest him only,
But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine
On all deservers. From hence to Inverness,
And bind us further to you.
Here the transition to the naming of Malcolm, for which there has been no preparation, is extremely
sudden; and the matter, considering its importance, is disposed of very briefly. But the abruptness
and brevity of the sentence in which Duncan invites himself to Macbeth's castle are still more
striking. For not a word has yet been said on the subject; nor is it possible to suppose that Duncan
had conveyed his intention by message, for in that case Macbeth would of course have informed
his wife of it in his letter (written in the interval between scenes iii. and iv. ). It is difficult not to
suspect some omission or curtailment here. On the other hand Shakespeare may have determined to
sacrifice everything possible to the effect of rapidity in the First Act; and he may also have wished,
by the suddenness and brevity of Duncan's self-invitation, to startle both Macbeth and the audience,
and to make the latter feel that Fate is hurrying the King and the murderer to their doom.
And that any extensive omissions have been made seems not likely. (I) There is no internal
evidence of the omission of anything essential to the plot. (2) Forman" who saw the play in 1610,
mentions nothing which we do not find in our play~ for his statement that Macbeth was made Duke
of Northumberland is obviously due to a confused recollection of Malcolm's being made Duke of
Cumberland. (3) Whereabouts could such omissions occur? Only in the first part" for the rest is full
enough. And surely anyone who wanted to cut the play down would have operated, say" on
Macbeth's talk with Banquo's murderers" or on Ill. vi., or on the very long dialogue of Malcolm and
Macduff: instead of reducing the most exciting part of the drama. We might indeed suppose that
Shakespeare himself originally wrote the first part more at length, and made the murder of Duncan
come in the Third Act" and then himself reduced his matter so as to bring the murder back to its
present place, perceiving in a flash of genius the extraordinary effect that might thus be produced.
But" even if this idea suited those who believe in a rehandling of the play, what probability is there
in it?
Thus it seems most likely that the play always was an extremely short one. Can we" then" at all
account for its shortness? It is possible, in the first place, that it was not composed originally for the
public stage" but for some private" perhaps royal" occasion, when time was limited. And the
presence of the passage about touching for the evil (IV. iii. 140 ff. ) supports this idea. We must
remember secondly" that some of the scenes would take longer to perform than ordinary scenes of
mere dialogue and action; e.g. the Witch-scenes" and the Battle-scenes in the last Act, for a broadsword combat was an occasion for an exhibition of skill. [ 1] And, lastly, Shakespeare may well
have felt that a play constructed and written like Macbeth, a play in which a kind of fever-heat is
felt almost from beginning to end, and which offers very little relief by means of humorous or
pathetic scenes" ought to be short, and would be unbearable if it lasted so long as Hamlet or even
King Lear .And in fact I do not think that" in reading" we feel Macbeth to be short: certainly we are
astonished when we hear that it is about half as long as Hamlet. Perhaps in the Shakespearean
theatre too it appeared to occupy a longer time than the clock recorded.
[ note 1] These two considerations should also be borne in mind in regard to the exceptional
shortness of the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Tempest. Both contain scenes, which, even on
the Elizabethan stage" would take an unusual time to perform. And it has been supposed of each
that it was composed to grace some wedding.
back to index ^
13. THE DATE OF MACBETH. METRICAL TESTS.
Dr. Forman saw Macbeth performed at the Globe in 1610. The question is how much earlier its
composition or first appearance is to be put.
It is agreed that the date is not earlier than that of the accession of James I in 1603 The style and
versification would make an earlier date almost impossible. And we have the allusions to, two-fold
balls and treble sceptres ' and to the descent of Scottish kings from Banquo; the undramatic
description of touching for the King's Evil (James performed this ceremony); and the dramatic use
of witchcraft, a matter on which James considered himself an authority.
Some of these references would have their fullest effect early in James's reign. And on this ground,
and on account both of resemblance’s in the characters of Hamlet and Macbeth, and of the use of
the supernatural in the two plays, it has been held that Macbeth was the tragedy that came next
after Hamlet, or, at any rate, next after Othello .
These arguments seem to me to have no force when set against those that point to a later date
(about 1606) and place Macbeth after King Lear .[ 1] And, as I have already observed, the
probability is that it also comes after Shakespeare's part of Timon , and immediately before
Anthony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus .
I will first refer briefly to some of the older arguments in favour of this later date, and then more at
length to those based on versification.
(1) In n. iii. 4-5, 'Here's a farmer that hang'd himself on the expectation of plenty,' Malone found a
reference to the exceptionally low price of wheat in 1606.
(2) In the reference in the same speech to the equivocator who could swear in both scales and
committed treason enough for God's sake, he found an allusion to the trial of the Jesuit
Garnet, in the spring of 1606, for complicity in the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. Garnet protested
on his soul and salvation that he had not held a certain conversation, then was obliged to confess
that he had, and thereupon 'fell into a large discourse defending equivocation.' This argument,
which I have barely sketched, seems to me much weightier than the first; and its weight is
increased by the further references to perjury and treason pointed out on p.397.
(3) Halliwel.l observed what appears to be an allusion to Macbeth in the comedy of the Puritan
,4to, 1607: ' we'll ha' the ghost i' th' white sheet sit at upper end o' th' table'; and Malone had
referred to a less striking parallel in Caesar and Pompey , also pub. 1607:
Why, think you, lords, that 'tis ambition's spur
That pricketh Caesar to these high attempts?
He also found a significance in the references in Macbeth to the genius of Mark Antony being
rebuked by Caesar, and to the insane root that takes the reason prisoner, as showing that
Shakespeare, while writing Macbeth, was reading Plutarch's Lives, with a view to his next play
Antony and Cleopatra (S.R. 1608)
(4) To these last arguments, which by themselves would be of little weight, I may add another, of
which the same may be said. Marston's reminiscences of Shakespeare are only too obvious. In his
Dutch Courtezan , 1605, I have noticed passages which recall Othello and King Lear , but nothing
that even faintly recalls Macbeth .But in reading Sophonisba , 1606, I was several times reminded
of Macbeth (as well as, more decidedly, of Othello ). I note the parallels for what they are worth.
With Sophonisba , Act I. Sc. ii. :
Upon whose tops the Roman eagles stretch'd
Their large spread wings, which fann'd the evening aire
To us cold breath,
cf Macbeth I. ii. 49:
Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky
And fan our people cold.
Cf Sophonisba, a page later: ' yet doubtful stood the fight,' with Macbeth, I. ii. 7, 'Doubtful it stood'
[' Doubtful long it stood'?] In the same scene of Macbeth the hero in fight is compared to an eagle,
and his foes to sparrows; and in Soph .m.ii. Massinassa in fight is compared to a falcon, and his
foes to fowls and lesser birds. I should not note this were it not that all these reminiscences (if they
are such), recall one and the same scene. In Sophonisba also there is a tremendous description of
the witch Erictho (IV. i. ), who says to the person consulting her, , I know thy thoughts,' as the
Witch says to Macbeth, of the Armed Head, 'He knows thy thought.'
(5) The resemblance’s between Othello and King Lear pointed out on pp. 244-5 and in Note R.
form, when taken in conjunction with other indications, an argument of some strength in favour of
the idea that King Lear followed directly on Othello.
(6) There remains the evidence of style and especially of metre. I will not add to what has been said
in the text concerning the former; but I wish to refer more fully to the latter, in so far as it can be
represented by the application of metrical tests. It is impossible to argue here the whole question of
these tests. I will only say that, while I am aware, and quite admit the force, of what can be said
against the independent, rash, or incompetent use of them, I am fully convinced of their value when
they are properly used.
Of these tests, that of rhyme and that of feminine endings, discreetly employed, are of use in
broadly distinguishing Shakespeare's plays into two groups, earlier and later, and also in marking
out the very latest dramas; and the feminine-ending test is of service in distinguishing
Shakespeare's part in Henry VIII. and the Two Noble Kinsmen. But neither of these tests has any
power to separate plays composed within a few years of one another. There is significance in the
fact that the Winter's Tale, the Tempest, Henry VIII, contain hardly any rhymed five-foot lines; but
none, probably, in the fact that Macbeth shows a higher percentage of such lines than King Lear ,
Othello, or Hamlet. The percentages of feminine endings, again, in the four tragedies, are almost
conclusive against their being early plays, and would tend to show that they were not among the
latest; but the differences in their respective percentages, which would place them in the
chronological order Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear (Konig), or Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear (Hertzberg), are of scarcely any account. [2] Nearlyall scholars, I think, would accept
these statements.
The really useful tests, in regard to plays, which admittedly are not widely separated, are three,
which concern the endings of speeches and lines. It is practically certain that Shakespeare made his
verse progressively less formal, by making the speeches end more and more often within a line and
not at the close of it; by making the sense overflow more and more often from one line into
another; and, at last, by sometimes placing at the end of a line a word on which scarcely any stress
can be laid. The corresponding tests may be called the
Speech ending test, the Overflow test, and the Light and Weak Ending test.
1. The Speech ending test has been used by Konig, [3] and I will first give some of his results. But I
regret to say that I am unable to discover certainly the rule he has gone by. He omits speeches
which are rhymed throughout, or which end with a rhymed couplet. And he counts only speeches,
which are 'mehrzeilig.' I suppose this means that he counts any speech consisting of two lines or
more, but omits not only one-line speeches, but speeches containing more than one line but less
than two; but I am not sure.
In the plays admitted by everyone to be early the percentage of speeches ending with an incomplete
line is quite small. In the Comedy of Errors , for example, it is only 0.6. It advances to 12.1 in King
John , 18.3 in Henry V., and 21.6 in As you Like It. It rises quickly soon after, and in no play
written ( according to general belief) after about 1600 or 1601 is it less than 30. In the admittedly
latest plays it rises much higher, the figures being as follows: Antony 77.5, Cor. 79, Temp. 84.5,
Cym. 85, Win. Tale 87.6, Henry VIII. (parts assigned to Shakespeare by Spedding) 89. Going back,
now, to the four tragedies, we find the following figures: Othello 41.4, Hamlet 51.6, Lear 60.9, and
Macbeth 77.2. These figures place Macbeth decidedly last, with a percentage practically equal to
that of Antony, the first of the final group.
Iwill now give my own figures for these tragedies, as they differ somewhat from Konig's, probably
because my method differs.
(1) I have included speeches rhymed or ending with rhymes, mainly because I find that
Shakespeare will sometimes (in later plays) end a speech which is partly rhymed with an
incomplete line ( e.g. Ham. Ill. ii. 187, and the last words of the play: or Macb. v. i. 87, v. ii. 31).
And if such speeches are reckoned, as they surely must be (for they may be, and are, highly
significant), those speeches which end with complete rhymed lines must also be reckoned. (2) I
have counted any speech exceeding a line in length, however little the excess may be; e.g.
I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked.
Give me my armour:
considering that the incomplete line here may be just as significant as an incomplete line ending a
longer speech. If a speech begins within a line and ends brokenly, of course I have not counted it
when it is equivalent to a five-foot line; e.g.
Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found:
but I do count such a speech (they are very rare) as
My lord, I do not know:
But truly I do fear it:
for the same reason that I count
You know not
Whether it was his wisdom or his fear.
Of the speeches thus counted, those, which end somewhere within the line, I find to be in
Othello about 54 per cent.; in Hamlet about 57; in King Lear about 69; in Macbeth about 75. [4]
The order is the same as Konig's, but the figures differ a good deal. I presume in the last three cases
this comes from the difference in method; but I think Konig's figures for Othello cannot be right,
for I have tried several methods and find that the result is in no case far from the result of my own,
and I am almost inclined to conjecture that Konigs 41.4 is really the percentage of speeches ending
with the close of a line, which would give 58.6 for the percentage of the broken-ended speeches.
[5]
We shall find that other tests also would put Othello before Hamlet, though close to it. This may he
due to 'accident' i.e. a cause or causes unknown to us; but I have sometimes wondered whether the
last revision of Hamlet may not have succeeded the composition of Othello. In this connection the
following fact may be worth notice. It is well known that the differences of the Second Quarto of
Hamlet from the First are much greater in the last three Acts than in the first two so much so that
the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare suggested that Q I represents an old play, of which
Shakespeare's rehandling had not then proceeded much beyond the Second Act, while Q 2
represents his later completed rehandling. If that were so, the composition or the last three Acts
would be a good deal later than that of the first two (though of course the first two would be revised
at the time of the composition of the last three). Now .1 find that the percentage of speeches ending
with a broken line is about 50 for the first two Acts, but about 62 for the last three. It
is lowest in the First Act, and in the first two Scenes of it is less than 32. The percentage for the last
two Acts is about 65.
II. The Enjambement or Overflow test is also known as the End-stopped and Run-on line test. A
line may be called 'end-stopped ' when the sense, as well as the metre, would naturally make one
pause at its close; 'run-on' when the mere sense would lead one to pass to the next line without any
pause. [6] This distinction is in a great majority of cases quite easy to draw: in others it is difficult.
The reader cannot judge by rules of grammar or by marks of punctuation (for there is a distinct
pause at the end of many a line where most editors print no stop): he must trust his ear. And readers
will differ, one making a distinct pause where another does not. This, however, does not matter
greatly, so long as the reader is consistent; for the important point is not the precise number of runon lines in a play, but the difference in this matter between one play and another. Thus one may
disagree with Konig in his estimate of many instances, but one can see that he is consistent.
In Shakespeare's early plays, , overflows' are rare In the Comedy of Errors, for example, their
percentage is 12.9 according to Konig [7] (who excludes rhymed lines and some others). In the
generally admitted last plays they are comparatively frequent. Thus, according to Konig, the
percentage in the Winter's Tale is 37. 5, in the Tempest 41.5, in Antony 43 .3, in Coriolanus 45.9,
in Cymbeline 46, in the parts of Henry VIII. assigned by Spedding to Shakespeare 53.18. Konig's
results for the four tragedies are as follows Othello, I9.5; Hamlet, 23.1 King Lear; 29.3; Macbeth,
36.6; (Timon, the whole play, 32.5). Macbeth here again, therefore, stands decidedly last: indeed it
stands near the first of the latest plays.
And no one who has ever attended to the versification of Macbeth will be surprised at these figures.
It is almost obvious, I should say, that Shakespeare is passing from one system to another. Some
passages show little change, but in others the change is almost complete. If the reader will compare
two somewhat similar soliloquies, 'To be or not to be' and 'if it were done when 'tis done,' he will
recognise this at once. Or let him search the previous plays, even King Lear, for twelve consecutive
lines like these
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well I
t were done quickly if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We 'Id jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.
Or let him try to parallel the following (Ill. vi. 37 f.):
and this report
Hath so exasperate the king that he
Prepares for some attempt of war.
Len.
Sent he to Macduff?
Lord.
He did: and with an absolute' Sir, not I,'
The cloudy messenger turns me his back
And hums, as who should say 'You'll rue the time
That clogs me with this answer. ,
Len.
And that well might
Advise him to a caution, to hold what distance
His wisdom can provide. Some holy angel
Fly to the court of England, and unfold
His message ere he come, that a swift blessing
May soon return to this our suffering country
Under a hand accurs'd !
or this (IV. iii. 118 f.):
Macduff, this noble passion,
Child of integrity, hath from my soul
Wiped the black scruples, reconciled my thoughts
To thy good truth and honour. Devilish Macbeth
By many of these trains hath sought to win me
Into his power, and modest wisdom plucks me
From over-credulous haste: but God above
Deal between thee and me! For even now
1 put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure
The taints and blames I laid upon myself,
For strangers to my nature.
I pass to another point. In the last illustration the reader will observe not only that ‘overflows’,
abound, but that they follow one another in an unbroken series of nine lines. So long a series could
not, probably, be found outside Macbeth and the last plays. A series of two or three is not
uncommon; but a series of more than three is rare in the early plays, and far from common in the
plays of the second period (Konig).
I thought it might be useful for our present purpose, to count the series of four and upwards in the
four tragedies, in the parts of Timon attributed by Mr. FIeay to Shakespeare, and in Coriolanus, a
play of the last period. I have not excluded rhymed lines in the two places where they occur, and
perhaps I may say that my idea of an 'overflow' is more exacting than Konig's. The reader will
understand the following table at once if I say that, according to it, Othello contains three passages
where a series of four successive overflowing lines occurs, and two passages where a series of five
such lines occurs:
Othello
Hamlet
Lear
Timon
Macbeth
Coriolanus
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
3
7
6
7
7
16
2
2
2
5
14
I
I
7
I
1
1
2
1
-
1
No of
Lines
(FIeay)
2758
2571
2312
1031
1706
2563
(The figures for Macbeth and Timon in the last column must be borne in mind. I observed nothing
in the non-Shakespeare part of Timon that would come into the table, but I did not make a careful
search. I felt some doubt as to two of the four-series in Othello and again in Hamlet, and also
whether the ten-series in Coriolanus should not be put in column 7).
III. The light and weak ending test.
We have just seen that in some cases a doubt is felt whether there is an 'overflow' or not. The fact is
that the 'overflow' has many degrees of intensity. If we take, for example, the passage last quoted,
and if with Konig we consider the line
The taints and blames I laid upon myself
to be run-on (as I do not), we shall at least consider the overflow to be much less distinct than those
in the lines ,
but God above
Deal between thee and me! for even now
I put myself to thy direction, and
Unspeak my own detraction, here abjure
And of these four lines the third runs on into its successor at much the greatest speed.
'Above,' 'now,' 'abjure,' are not light or weak endings: 'and' is a weak ending. Prof Ingram gave the
name weak ending to certain words on which it is scarcely possible to dwell at all, and which,
therefore, precipitate the line which they close into the following. Light endings are certain words,
which have the same effect in a slighter degree. For example, and, from, in, of, are weak endings;
am, are, I, he, are light endings.
The test founded on this distinction is, within its limits, the most satisfactory of all, partly because
the work of its author can be absolutely trusted. The result of its application is briefly as follows.
Until quite a late date light and weak endings occur in Shakespeare's works in such small numbers
as hardly to be worth consideration. [8] But in the well-defined group of last plays the numbers
both of light and of weak endings increase greatly, and, on the whole, the increase apparently is
progressive (I say apparently, because the order in which the last plays are generally placed
depends to some extent on the test itself). I give Prof Ingram's table of these plays, premising that
in Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VllI. he uses only those parts of the plays which are
attributed by certain authorities to Shakespeare (New Shakespeare Soc. Trans., 1874).
Anthony&
Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Pericles
Tempest
Cymbeline
Winters Tale
Two Noble
Kinsmen
Henry Vill
Light
endings
Weak
Percentage Percentage Percentage
of light in of weak in
of
verse lines verse lines
both
71
60
20
42
78
57
28
44
10
25
52
43
2.53
2.34
2.78
2.88
2.90
3.12
1.00
1.71
1.39
1.71
1.93
2.36
3.53
4.05
4.17
4.59
4.83
5.48
50
45
34
37
3.63
3.93
2.47
3.23
6.10
7.16
Now, let us turn to our four tragedies (with Timon). Here again we have one doubtful play, and I
give the figures for the whole of Timon, and again for the parts of Timon assigned to Shakespeare
by Mr. Fleay, both as they appear in his amended text and as they appear in the Globe (perhaps the
better text).
Light
Weak
Hamlet
8
0
Othello
2
0
Lear
5
1
Timon (whole)
16
5
(Sh.inFleay)
14
7
(Sh. in Globe)
13
2
Macbeth
21
2
Now here the figures for the first three plays tell us practically nothing. The tendency to a freer use
of these endings is not visible. As to Timon, the number of weak endings, I think, tells us little, for
probably only two or three are Shakespeare's; but the rise in the number of. light endings is so
marked as to be significant. And most significant is this rise in the case of Macbeth, which, like
Shakespeare's part of Timon, is much shorter than the preceding plays. It strongly confirms the
impression that in Macbeth we have the transition to Shakespeare's last style, and that the play is
the latest of the five tragedies. [9]
[ note 1] The fact that King Lear was performed at Court on December 26, 1606, is of course very
far from showing that it had never been performed before.
[note 2] I have not tried to discover the source of the difference between these two reckonings.
[note 3] Der Vers in Shakspere's Dramen, 1888.
[note 4] In the parts of Timon (Globe text) assigned by Mr. FIeay to Shakespeare, I find the
percentage to be about 74.5. Kronic gives 62.8 as the percentage in the whole of the play.
[note 5] I have noted also what must ix a mistake in the case of Pericles. Konig gives 17.1 as the
Percentage of the speeches with broken ends. I was astounded to see the figure, considering the
style in the undoubtedly Shakespearean parts; and I find that, on my method, in Acts Ill., IV., v.the
percentage is about 71, in the first two Acts (which show very slight, if any, traces of Shakespeare's
hand) about 19.1 cannot imagine the origin of the mistake here.
[ note 6]1 put the matter thus, instead of saying that, with a run-on line, one does pass to the next
line without any pause, because, in common with many others, I should not in any case whatever
wholly ignore the fact that one line ends and another begins.
[note 7] These overflows are what Konig calls' schroffe Enjambements,' which he considers to
correspond with Fumivall's ' run on lines.'
[note 8] The number of light endings, however, in Julius Caesar (10) and All's Well (12) is worth
notice.
[note 9] The Editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare might appeal in support of their view, that parts
of Act v. are not Shakespeare's, to the fact that the last of the light endings occurs at IV. iii 165.
back to index ^
14. WHEN WAS THE MURDER OF DUNCAN FIRST PLOTTED?
A good many readers probably think that, when Macbeth first met the Witches, he was perfectly
innocent; but a much larger number would say that he had already harboured a vaguely guilty
ambition, though he had not faced the idea of murder. And I think there can be no doubt that this is
the obvious and natural interpretation of the scene. Only it is almost necessary to go rather further,
and to suppose that his guilty ambition, whatever its precise form, was known to his wife and
shared by her. Otherwise, surely, she would not, on reading his letter, so instantaneously assume
that the King must be murdered in their castle; nor would Macbeth, as soon as he meets her, be
aware (as he evidently is) that this thought is in her mind.
But there is a famous passage in Macbeth which, closely considered, seems to require us to go
further still, and to suppose that, at some time before the action of the play begins, the husband and
wife had explicitly discussed the idea of murdering Duncan at some favourable opportunity and
had agreed to execute this idea. Attention seems to have been first drawn to this passage by Koester
in vol. 1. of the Jahrbucher d. deutschen Shakespeare-gesellschaft , and on it is based the
interpretation of the play in Werder's very able Vorlesungen uber Macbeth .
The passage occurs in I. vii., where Lady Macbeth is urging her husband to the deed:
Macb.
Prithee, peace:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
Lady M. What beast was't, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
Here Lady Macbeth asserts (1) that Macbeth proposed the murder to her: (2) that he did so at a time
when there was no opportunity to attack Duncan, no' adherence' of' time' and 'place': (3) that he
declared he would make an opportunity, and swore to carry out the murder.
Now it is possible that Macbeth's 'swearing' might have occurred in an interview off the stage
between scenes v. and vi., or scenes vi. and vii.; and, if in that interview Lady Macbeth had with
difficulty worked her husband up to a resolution, her irritation at his relapse, in sc. vii., would be
very natural. But, as for Macbeth's first proposal of murder, it certainly does not occur in our play,
nor could it possibly occur in any interview off the stage; for when Macbeth and his wife first meet,
, time' and' place' do adhere; , they have made themselves.' The conclusion would seem to be, either
that the proposal of the murder, and probably the oath, occurred in a scene at the very beginning of
the play, which scene has been lost or cut out; or else that Macbeth proposed, and swore to execute,
the murder at some time prior to the action of the play. [ I] The first of these hypotheses is most
improbable, and we seem driven to adopt the second, unless we consent to burden Shakespeare
with a careless mistake in a critical passage.
And apart from unwillingness to do this, we can find a good deal to say in favour of the idea of a
plan formed at a past time. It would explain Macbeth's start of fear at the prophecy of the kingdom.
It would explain why Lady Macbeth, on receiving his letter, immediately resolves on action; and
why, on their meeting, each knows that murder is in the mind of the other. And it is in harmony
with her remarks on his probable shrinking from the act, to which, ex hypothesi she had already
thought it necessary to make him pledge himself by an oath.
Yet I find it very difficult to believe in this interpretation. It is not merely that the interest of
Macbeth's struggle with himself and with his wife would be seriously diminished if we felt he had
been through all this before. I think this would be so; but there are two more important objections.
In the first place the violent agitation described in the words,
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion?
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
would surely not be natural, even in Macbeth, if the idea of murder were already quite familiar to
him through conversation with his wife, and if he had already done more than 'yield' to it. It is not
as if the Witches had told him that Duncan was coming to his house. In that case the perception that
the moment had come to execute a merely general design might well appal him. But all that he
hears is that he will one day be King a statement which, supposing this general design, would not
point to any immediate action. [2] And, in the second place, it is hard to believe that, if
Shakespeare really had imagined the murder planned and sworn to before the action of the play, he
would have written the first six scenes hI such a manner t~at practically all readers imagine quite
another state of affairs, and continue to imagine it even after they have read in scene vii. the
passage which is troubling us. Is it likely, to put it otherwise, that his idea was one, which nobody
seems to have divined till late in the nineteenth century? And for what possible reason could he
refrain from making this idea clear to his audience, as he might so easily have done in the third
scene? [3] It seems very much more likely that he himself imagined the matter as nearly all his
readers do.
But, in that case, what are we to say of this passage? I will answer first by explaining the way in
which I understood it before I was aware that it had caused so much difficulty .I supposed that an
interview had taken place after scene v., a scene which shows Macbeth shrinking, and in which his
last words were' we will speak further.' In this interview, I supposed, his wife had so wrought upon
him that he had at last yielded and pledged himself by oath to do the murder. As for her statement
that he had 'broken the enterprise' to her, I took it to refer to his letter to her, a letter written when
time and place did not adhere, Or he did not yet know that Duncan was coming to visit him. In the
letter he does not, of course, openly' break the enterprise' to her, and it is not likely that he would
do such a thing in a letter; but if they had had ambitious conversations, in which each felt that some
half-formed guilty idea was floating in the mind of the other, she might naturally take the words of
the letter as indicating much more than they said; and then in her passionate contempt at his
hesitation, and her passionate eagerness to overcome it, she might easily accuse him, doubtless
with exaggeration, and probably with conscious exaggeration, of having actually proposed the
murder. And Macbeth, knowing that when he wrote the letter he really had been thinking of
murder, and indifferent to anything except the question whether murder should be done, would
easily let her statement pass unchallenged.
This interpretation still seems to me not unnatural. The alternative (unless we adopt the idea of all
agreement prior to the action of the play) is to suppose that Lady Macbeth refers throughout the
passage to some interview subsequent to her husband's return, and that, in making her do so,
Shakespeare simply forgot her speeches on welcoming Macbeth home, and also forgot that at any
such interview 'time' and 'place' did 'adhere.' It is easy to understand such forgetfulness in a
spectator and even in a reader; but it is difficult to imagine it in a poet whose conception of the two
characters throughout these scenes was evidently so burningly vivid.
[note 1] The 'swearing' might of course, on this view, occur off the stage within the play; but there
is no occasion to suppose this if we are obliged to put the proposal outside the play.
[note 2] To this it might be answered that the effect of the prediction was to make him feel, , Then I
shall succeed if I carry out the plan of murder, and so make him yield to the idea over again. To
which I can only reply, anticipating the next argument, 'How is it that Shakespeare wrote the
speech in such away that practically everybody supposes the idea of murder to be occurring to
Macbeth for the first time?'
[note 3] It might be answered here again that the actor, instructed by Shakespeare, could act the
start of fear so as to convey quite clearly the idea of definite guilt. And this is true; but we ought to
do our best to interpret the text before we have recourse to this kind of suggestion.
back to index ^
15. DID LADY MACBETH REALL Y FAINT?
In the scene of confusion where the murder of Duncan is discovered, Macbeth and Lennox return
from the royal chamber; Lennox describes the grooms who, as it seemed, had done the deed:
Their hands and faces were all badged with blood;
So were their daggers, which unwiped we found
Upon their pillows:
They stared, and were distracted; no man's life
Was to be trusted with them.
Macb. O, yet I do repent me of my fury
That I' did kill them.
Macd. Wherefore did you so?
Macb. Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,
Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:
The expedition of my violent love
Outrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood;
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech'd with gore: who could refrain,
That had a heart to love, and in that heart
Courage to make's love known?
At this point Lady Macbeth exclaims, , Help me hence, ho! ' Her husband takes no notice, but
Macduff calls out 'Look to the lady.' This, after a few words 'aside' between Malcolm and
Donalbain, is repeated by Banquo, and, very shortly after, all except Duncan's sons exeunt. (The
stage-direction 'Lady Macbeth is carried out,' after Banquo's exclamation 'Look to the lady,' is not
in the Ff and was introduced by Rowe. If the Ff are right, she can hardly have fainted away. But the
point has no importance here. )
Does Lady Macbeth really turn faint, or does she pretend? The latter seems to have been the
general view, and Whately pointed out that Macbeth's indifference betrays his consciousness that
the faint was not real. But to this it may be answered that, if he believed it to be real, he would
equally show indifference, in order to display his horror at the murder. And Miss Helen Faucit and
others have held that there was no pretence.
In favour of the pretence it may be said (I) that Lady Macbeth, who herself took back the daggers,
saw the old king in his blood, and smeared the grooms, was not the woman to faint at a mere
description; (2) that she saw her husband over-acting his part, and saw the faces of the lords, and
wished to end the scene, -which she succeeded in doing.
But to the last argument it may be replied that she would not willingly have run the risk of believe
her husband to act his part alone. And for other reasons (indicated above, p. 373 f.) I decidedly that
she is meant really to faint. She was no Goneril. She knew that she could not kill the King herself;
and she never expected to have to carry back the daggers, see the bloody corpse, and smear the
faces and hands of the grooms. But Macbeth's agony greatly alarmed her, and she was driven to the
scene of horror to complete his task; and what an impression it made on her we know from that
sentence uttered in her sleep, 'Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood
in him?' She had now, further, gone through the ordeal of the discovery .Is it not quite natural that
the reaction should come, and that it should come just when Macbeth's description recalls the scene
which had cost her the greatest effort? Is it not likely, besides, that the expression on the faces of
the lords would force her to realise, what before the murder she had refused to consider, the horror
and the suspicion it must excite? It is noticeable, also, that she is far from carrying out her intention
of bearing apart in making their 'griefs and clamours roar upon his death' (1. vii. 78). She has left it
all to her husband, and, after uttering but two sentences, the second of which is answered very
curtly by Banquo, for some time (an interval of33 lines) she has said nothing. I believe Shakespeare
means this interval to be occupied in desperate efforts on her part to prevent herself from giving
way, as she sees for the first time something of the truth to which she was formerly so blind, and
which will destroy her in the end.
It should be observed that at the close of the Banquet scene, where she has gone through much less,
she is evidently exhausted.
Shakespeare, of course, knew whether he meant the faint to be real: but I am not aware if an actor
of the part could show the audience whether it was real or pretended. If he could, he would
doubtless receive instructions from the author.
. back to index ^
16. DURATION OF THE ACTION IN MACBETH.
MACBETHS AGE. , HE HAS NO CHILDREN. ,
1. The duration of the action cannot well be more than a few months. Oh the day following the
murder of Duncan his sons fly and Macbeth goes to Scone to be invested (n. iv.)
Between this scene and Act Ill. an interval must be supposed, sufficient for news to arrive of
Malcolm being in England and Donalbain in Ireland, and for Banquo to have shown himself a good
counsellor. But the interval is evidently not long: e.g. Banquo's first words are 'Thou hast it now'
(ill. i. I). Banquo is murdered on the day when he speaks these words. Macbeth's visit to the
Witches takes place the next day (ill. iv. 132). At the end of this visit (IV. i. ) he hears of Macduffs
flight to England, and determines to have Macduffs wife and children slaughtered without delay;
and this is the subject of the next scene (IV. ii.). No great interval, then, can be supposed between
this scene and the next, where Macduff, arrived at the English court, hears what has happened at his
castle. At the end of that scene (IV iii. 237) Malcolm says that 'Macbeth is ripe for shaking, and the
powers above put on their instruments': and the events of Act v. evidently follow with little delay,
and occupy but a short time. Holinshed's Macbeth appears to have reigned seventeen years:
Shakespeare's may perhaps be allowed as many weeks.
But, naturally, Shakespeare creates some difficulties through wishing to produce different
impressions in different parts of the play. The main effect is that of fiery speed, and it would be
impossible to imagine the torment of Macbeth's mind lasting through a number of years, even if
Shakespeare had been willing to allow him years of outward success. Hence the brevity of the
action. On the other hand time is wanted for the degeneration of his character hinted at in IV. iii. 57
f, for the development of his tyranny, for his attempts to entrap Malcolm (ib. 117 f), and perhaps
for the deepening of his feeling that his life had passed into the sere and yellow leaf Shakespeare,
as we have seen, scarcely provides time for all this, but at certain points he produces an impression
that a longer time has elapsed than he has provided for, and he puts most of the indications of this
longer time into a scene (IV . iii.) which by its quietness contrasts strongly with almost all the rest
of the play.
2, There is no unmistakable indication of the ages of the two principal characters; but the question,
though of no great importance, has an interest. I believe most readers imagine Macbeth as a man
between forty and fifty, and his wife as younger but not young. In many cases this impression is
doubtless due to the custom of the theatre (which, ifit can be shown to go back far, should have
much weight), but it is shared by readers who have never seen the play performed, and is then
presumably due to a number of slight influences probably incapable of complete analysis. Such
readers would say, 'The hero and heroine do not speak like young people, nor like old ones '; but,
though I think this is so, it can hardly be demonstrated. Perhaps however the following small
indications, mostly of a different kind, tend to the same result.
(1) There is no positive sign of youth. (2) A young man would not be likely to lead the army. (3)
Macbeth is' cousin' to an old man. [1] (4) Macbeth calls Malcolm ' young' and speaks of him
scornfully its' the boy Malcolm.' He is probably therefore considerably his senior. But Malcolm is
evidently not really a boy (see I. ii. 3 f as well as the later Acts). (5) One gets the impression
(possibly without reason) that Macbeth and Banquo are of about the same age; and Banquo's son,
the boy Fleance, is evidently not a mere child. (On the other hand the children of Macduff, who is
clearly a good deal older than Malcolm, are all young; and I do not think there is any sign that
Macbeth is older than Macduff. ) (6) When Lady Macbeth, in the banquet scene, says,
Sit, worthy friends: my lord is often thus, And hath been from his youth, we naturally imagine him
some way removed from his youth. (7) Lady Macbeth saw a resemblance to her father in the aged
king. (8) Macbeth says,
I have lived long enough: my way [2] of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I may not look to have.
It is, surely, of the old age of the soul that he speaks in the second line, but still the lines would
hardly be spoken under any circumstances by a man less than middle-aged.
On the other hand I suppose no one ever imagined Macbeth, or on consideration could imagine
him, as more than middle-aged when the action begins. And in addition the reader may observe, if
he finds it necessary, that Macbeth looks forward to having children (I. vii. 72), and that his terms
of endearment (' dearest love,’ dearest chuck I) and his language in public ('sweet remembrancer')
do not suggest that his wife and he are old; they even suggest that she at least is scarcely middleaged. But this discussion tends to grow ludicrous.
For Shakespeare's audience these mysteries were revealed by a glance at the actors, like the fact
that Duncan was an old man, which the text, I think, does not disclose till v. i. 44.
3. Whether Macbeth had children or (as seems usually to be supposed) had none, is quite
immaterial. But it is material that, if he had none, he looked forward to having one; for otherwise
there would be no point in the following words in his soliloquy about Banquo (Ill. i. 58 f):
Then prophet-Iike
They hail'd him father to a line of kings:
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding. If 't be so,
For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind.
And he is determined that it shall not I be so':
Rather than so, come, fate, into the list
And champion me to the utterance!
Obviously he contemplates a son of his succeeding if only he can get rid of Banquo and Fleance.
What he fears is that Banquo will kill him~ in which case, supposing he has a son, that son will not
he allowed to succeed him, and, supposing he has none, he will be unable to beget one.
I hope this is clear~ and nothing else matters. Lady Macbeth's child (I. vii. 54) may be alive or may
be dead. It may even be, or have been, her child by a former husband~ though if Shakespeare had
followed history in making Macbeth marry a widow (as some writers gravely assume) he would
probably have told us so. It may be that Macbeth had many children or that he had none. We
cannot say, and it does not concern the play. But the interpretation of a statement on which some
critics build, , He has no children, , has an interest of another kind, and I proceed to consider it.
These words occur at IV. iii. 216. Malcolm and Macduff are talking at the English Court, and Ross,
arriving from Scotland, brings news to Macduff of Macbeth's revenge on him. It is necessary to
quote a good many lines:
Ross. Your castle is surprised~ your wife and babes Savagely slaughter'd: to relate the manner,
Were, on the quarry of these murder'd deer, To add the death of you.
Mal.
Merciful heaven!
What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows:
Chive sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.
Macd.
My children too?
Ross. Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found.
Macd.
And I must be from thence!
My wife kill'd too ?
Ross.
l have said.
Mal.
Be comforted:
Let's makes us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief
Macd.
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?
Mal.
Dispute it like a man.
Macd.
l shall do so~
But I must also feel it as a man:
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me.
Three interpretations have been offered of the words' He has no children.'
(a) They refer to Malcolm, who, if he had children of his own, would not at such a moment suggest
revenge, or talk of curing such a grief. Cf. King John , Dl. iv. 91, where Pandulph says to
Constance,
You hold too heinous a respect of grief,
and Constance answers,
He talks to me that never had a son.
(b) They refer to Macbeth, who has no children, and on whom therefore Macduff cannot take an
adequate revenge.
(c) They refer to Macbeth, who, if he himself had children, could never have ordered the slaughter
of children. Cf. 3 Henry VI. v v. 63, where Margaret says to the murderers of Prince Edward,
You have no children, butchers! if you had,
The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.
I cannot think interpretation (b) the most natural. The whole idea of the passage is that Macduff
must feel grief first and before he can feel anything else, e.g. the desire for vengeance. As he says
directly after, he cannot at once 'dispute' it like a man, but must 'feel' it as a man; and it is not till
ten lines later that he is able to pass to the thought of revenge. Macduff is not the man to conceive
at any time the idea of killing children in retaliation; and that he contemplates it here, even as a
suggestion, I find it hard to believe.
For the same main reason interpretation (a) seems to me far more probable than (c). What could be
more consonant with the natural course of the thought, as developed in the lines which follow, than
that Macduff, being told to think of revenge, not grief, should answer, 'No one who was himself a
father would ask that of me in the very first moment of loss'? But the thought supposed by
interpretation ( c) has not this natural connection.
It has been objected to interpretation (a) that, according to it, Macduff would naturally say 'You
have no children,' not' He has no children.' but what Macduff does is precisely what Constance
does in the line quoted from King John. And it should be noted that, all through the passage down
to this point, and indeed in the fifteen lines, which precede our quotation, Macduff listens only to
Ross. His questions' My children too?' 'My wife killed too?' show that he cannot fully realise what
he is told. When Malcolm interrupts, therefore, he puts aside his suggestion with four words spoken
to himself, or (less probably) to Ross (his relative, who knew his wife and children), and continues
his agonised questions and exclamations. Surely it is not likely that at that moment the idea of ( c ),
an idea which there is nothing to suggest, would occur to him.
In favour of(c) as against (a) I see no argument except that the words of Macduff almost repeat
those of Margaret; and this fact does not seem to me to have much weight. It shows only that
Shakespeare might easily use the words in the sense of ( c ) if that sense were suitable to the
occasion. It is not unlikely, again, I think, that the words came to him here because he had used
them many years before; [3] but it does not follow that he knew he was repeating them; or that, if
he did, he remembered the sense they had previously borne; or that, if he did remember it, he might
not use them now in another sense.
[note 1] So in Holinshed, as well as in the play, where however 'cousin' need not have its specific
meaning.
[note 2] 'May,' Johnson conjectured, without necessity[ note 3] As this point occurs here, I may observe that Shakespeare's later tragedies contain many
such reminiscences of the tragic plays of his young days. For instance, cf. Titus Andronicus,I. i.
150 f.:
In peace and honour rest you here, my sons,
*********
Secure from worldly chances and mishaps!
Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
Here grow no damned drugs: here are no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep,
with Macbeth Ill. ii. 22 f.
Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.
In writing IV. i. Shakespeare can hardly have failed to remember the conjuring of the Spirit, and
the ambiguous oracles, in 2 Henry VI. I. iv. The 'Hyrcan tiger' of Macbeth Dl. iv. 101, which is also
alluded to in Hamlet appears first in 3 Henry VI 1. iv. 155. Cf. Richard 111. n. i. 92, , Nearer in
bloody thoughts, but not in blood,' with Macbeth n. iii. 146, 'the near in blood, the nearer bloody';
Richard ill. IV. ii. 64, , But I am in so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin,' with Macbeth ill. iv.
136, '1 am in blood stepp'd in so far,' etc. These are but a few instances. (It makes no difference
whether Shakespeare was author or reviser of Titus and Henry VI.)-
. back to index ^
17. THE GHOST OF BANQUO.
I do not think the suggestions that the Ghost on its first appearance is Banquo's, and on its second
Duncan's, or vice versa , are worth discussion. But the question whether Shakespeare meant the
Ghost to be real or a mere hallucination, has some interest, and I have not seen it fully examined.
The following reasons may be given for the hallucination view:
( I) We remember that Macbeth has already seen one hallucination, that of the dagger; and if we
failed to remember it Lady Macbeth would remind us of it here:
This is the very painting of your fear;
This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said,
Led you to Duncan.
(2) The Ghost seems to be created by Macbeth's imagination; for his words,
now they rise again
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
describe it, and they echo what the murderer had said to him a little before,
Safe in a ditch he bides
With twenty trenched gashes on his head.
(3) It vanishes the second time on his making a violent effort and asserting its unreaiity:
Hence, horrible shadow!
Unreal mockery, hence!
This is not quite so the first time, but then too its disappearance follows on his defying it:
Why what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
So, apparently, the dagger vanishes when he exclaims, 'There's no such thing! I
(4) At the end of the scene Macbeth himself seems to regard it as an illusion:
My strange and self -abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use.
(5) it does not speak, like the Ghost in Hamlet even on its last appearance, and like the Ghost in
Julius Caesar .
( 6) it is visible only to Macbeth. ,.
I should attach no weight to (6) taken alone. Of (3) it may be remarked that Brutus himself seems
to attribute the vanishing of Caesar's Ghost to his taking courage: 'now I have taken heart thou
vanishest: ' yet he certainly holds it to be real. It may also be remarked on (5) that Caesar's Ghost
says nothing that Brutus' own forebodings might not have conjured up. And further it may be asked
why, if the Ghost of Banquo was meant for an illusion, it was represented on the stage, as the stagedirections and Forman's account show it to have been.
On the whole, and with some doubt, I think that Shakespeare (I) meant the judicious to take the
Ghost for an hallucination, but (2) knew that the bulk of the audience would take it for a reality.
And I am more sure of (2) than of (I).